The story in three lines. Lan and Inkling fold Kami into a fortune teller and step onto a hill on Tanegashima in Japan on 18 March 1995. A rocket is about to carry a satellite with a big folded panel into space, and four-year-old Emi is sure the panel will be squashed. Lan scrunches paper into a ball to make it small, but it cannot open again. Watching a folded square open in one pull, the cast fold a fortune teller, and Lan shows Emi how to work it herself.

One question to ask. "Why did the scrunched ball not open, but the fortune teller did?" The answer the story wants: folds are in chosen places, so they decide how the paper moves; a scrunch has no plan. Then ask what went wrong when one corner went past the middle.

One thing to do at the table. Fold a fortune teller together: four corners to the middle, turn it over, four corners to the middle again, then fold it in half and push your fingers into the pockets. Then scrunch a second sheet into a ball and try to open it flat. Talk about the difference. If you have a road map, look at how it is folded so it opens and closes again.

The grown-up layer. The Space Flyer Unit was launched from Tanegashima on 18 March 1995. Its 2D Array, a large flat panel, was packed in a Miura fold, named after the scientist Koryo Miura: a pattern of creases that opens in one movement when you pull the ends. Engineers call folding like this a mechanism, because the creases decide the motion. The fortune teller is the same idea at the size of a child's hand.

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