On April 1st the opening of the exhibition GRAFIKI! at the 8th Montessori School Zeeburg (Amsterdam) took place. All groups, large and small, have been investigating the combination of image and language.

Art teachers who work for De Rode Loper op School were invited to work with the children. I worked with five groups of children that were either 5-7 or 6-8 years old.

For the first lesson I brought a lot of beautiful second hand books about nature, landscape, space, flowers, animals. The children looked for images from different books and combined them, by cutting and pasting, into a new image that didn’t need to be possible in real life (preferably not!): a monkey in space, huge flowers coming out of a castle, a mole on a volcano, etcetera.
In the second lesson they learned how to make names for the pictures in their collages. They discovered that, just like the pictures, words could be stuck together to make new words. The monkey in space was a “space monkey”, the mole on a volcano ‘mole eruption’. They wrote their words down, then stamped them and glued them onto their collages. Eventually all children decorated their work with crayons, in order to get a nice frame, just like you see around paintings in a museum, because on April 1st, their school will be transformed into a museum too!