The picture on the model box

Text A: an original contemporary practice extract.

I spread the model ship’s pieces across the table and opened the instruction booklet. The finished vessel on the box looked impossibly neat. Its small railings seemed to belong to a world in which fingers never shook and glue never reached the wrong place. Yet the first page asked only for two parts I could identify. I joined them and turned the page.

By Sunday, the ship stood upright. One railing leaned, and I had painted a patch twice to cover a mistake. Following the sequence had not made me a passenger in somebody else’s work. I had learned how to hold a small piece steady and when to leave a join alone. The plan made those decisions reachable without asking me to invent a whole vessel first.

I also enjoy building without a kit. But originality should not become a rule that makes every borrowed plan embarrassing. The ship on my shelf resembles the picture and carries marks of my making. I value both facts. A clear sequence can give a beginner a first finished object, and finishing may be what makes a more independent experiment possible next.

Text B: an original contemporary practice extract.

My daughter finished the kit castle on Saturday and lined its towers up with the photograph on the box. Everything matched. On Sunday, she removed one wall and made a doorway large enough for a toy bus. The instructions supplied no suitable stage for that alteration, so she used spare pieces and asked whether the bus could become part of the story.

I liked the careful building she had done the day before. I was more interested in the question that appeared when the finished picture stopped being the destination. A model can be accurately completed and still invite changes its designer did not plan. If we pack it away as soon as it looks right, we may mistake the end of the booklet for the end of making.

Give children kits when they enjoy them, and keep a box of loose pieces nearby. Do not make every change a mistake to be corrected against the photograph. Following a plan and departing from it need not be competing virtues. In our house, the castle first became recognisable; then it became somewhere a bus could arrive. The second achievement would not have fitted neatly on the lid.

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about building models from kits. Support your comparisons with detailed references to both texts.