The story in three lines. Lan and Inkling fold Kami into a puppy face and step into a small house in Tokyo in 1954, where Hana wants to send her five-year-old cousin a paper puppy to fold. Her cousin cannot read yet. Lan starts writing the steps as words before Mark stops her. Reading the drawings of a man in the next room, the cast make a letter of five pictures with dashed lines and arrows, and Lan runs the test herself, keeping quiet while a neighbour who cannot read folds the puppy from them.

One question to ask. "How could Yuki learn to fold without reading?" The answer the story wants: a picture can say "fold here" with a dashed line and "this way" with an arrow. Then ask what went wrong when the ear arrow pointed up.

One thing to do at the table. Fold one simple thing, like a paper puppy or a triangle. Draw each step as a small picture with no words: the paper, a dashed line where the fold goes, and an arrow for the way it moves. Give the pictures to someone else and watch them fold, without helping. Where they get stuck, that picture needs fixing.

The grown-up layer. In 1954 Akira Yoshizawa published his first book, New Origami Art. It used a system of marks that folders around the world still use: a dashed line for a valley fold, a dash-and-dot line for a mountain fold, arrows for the movement. Samuel Randlett and Robert Harbin added a few marks later. A diagram is a language, and checking one is what this site calls the Paper Test: a person who has never seen the model folds it from the pictures alone.

Let your child tell the story back in their own words first.