At Dai-ichi, a Japanese preschool, two classes of five-year-olds have been working together to write and develop a play for a holiday school assembly. Tomoko, who is particularly fond of writing stories and poems, decides to write a song for the play. She brings lyrics to school one morning and works on them during the free play period. With the help of her teacher and two classmates, Tomoko sits at the piano and sets her words to music, amid much laughter and chatter. Afterward, the class has its Morning Class Meeting, where the teacher explains to the group that Tomoko has written a song for their class play. She thanks Tomoko, as well as the two classmates who helped her, for writing “such a nice song for us” and begins to sing it to the class. They begin to sing along with her, and after several repetitions, most of the children have learned the song. Saying, “Here the girls wrote such a nice song,” she prompts the children to agree to use it as the finale of their play.

A few days later, when I heard the teacher refer to the song as “the song that we all wrote together,” I realized that what I had regarded as Tomoko's song had become the class's song. Indeed, when the children performed the play at the assembly, the teacher made no mention of Tomoko's special contribution. She simply introduced the play as “the play that the five-yearold classes wrote together.”