Implementation of “Photism – Creating Music Through Artworks” (SoI-GR-595)
Author: Aikaterini Spitsa
School/Organisation: 2nd Experimental Model Kindergarten of Thessaloniki
Introduction
This Story of Implementation adapts the learning scenario “Photism – Creating Music Through Artworks” for a preschool setting (ages 4-6). The scenario originally focused on students aged 7-8 connecting art and music through synaesthesia. To make it suitable for preschoolers, we introduced the topic through emotional and color recognition, storytelling, and simple interactive digital tools. We included Hervé Tullet’s book “Mix It Up!”, sensory exploration, and various digital applications like Genially, Canva, Google Forms, Teachable Machine, and Makey Makey. The context involved 15 preschoolers in a blended classroom (digital and physical materials).
Learning process
The Rationale
My name is Katerina Spitsa, and I implemented the learning scenario “Photism – Creating Music Through Artworks” with my 15 preschoolers at 2nd Experimental Model Kindergarten of Thessaloniki, an innovative early childhood education setting that prioritizes inquiry-based learning, emotional development, and interdisciplinary activities. Originally designed for primary students, the scenario was adapted to suit the developmental level of preschool-aged children. These adaptations focused on helping students explore emotions, colors, art, and music using age-appropriate language, tools, and collaborative activities.
Our preschool supports creativity, self-expression, and digital literacy in early learners. The students already had some familiarity with using tablets and basic digital tools, which made it easier to introduce activities involving Genially, Canva, Micro:bit, and even AI-based platforms like Leonardo AI and Teachable Machine. Methodologically, we employed play-based learning, cooperative exploration, and experiential approaches. Our teaching strategies included storytelling, music and movement, guided digital tasks, artistic creation, and reflection. These allowed children to discover connections between emotion and expression, between art and technology, and between human and artificial creativity. This interdisciplinary approach enriched their social-emotional learning while promoting early 21st-century skills engagingly and joyfully.
Introduction through Storytelling and Colors (30 minutes)
We began by reading Hervé Tullet’s book with the title “Mix It Up!” to introduce color theory in a playful, engaging way. This activity supported the development of listening comprehension, symbolic thinking, and basic scientific inquiry as children predicted and observed color changes. Children practiced mixing primary colors using paint, learning about color relationships, cause and effect, and improving fine motor skills. Have a look at the following videos https://youtu.be/iUE2I4kraS8 and https://youtu.be/WGKnuHVcH10
Interacting with the book and mixing colors CC BY-NC-ND. Katerina Spitsa
Mixing lines, mixing colours. CC BY-NC-ND. Katerina Spitsa
Emotion Exploration and Color Matching (20 minutes)
Children used mirrors, flashcards, and peer observation to identify and mimic different emotions, helping them build emotional literacy and self-awareness. Each emotion was matched with a color (e.g., red for anger, blue for sadness), reinforcing color recognition and emotional vocabulary. This association helped deepen their understanding of abstract emotional concepts through visual supports.
Expressing and recognising emotions. CC BY-NC-ND. Katerina Spitsa
The emotions and colours matching board. CC BY-NC-ND. Katerina Spitsa
Emotions Dice Game in Genially (20 minutes)
We introduced an interactive Genially game designed around emotional expression. The game featured a digital dice roll mechanic—each face of the dice represented a different emotion (happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, calm). Students took turns rolling the virtual dice and then acted out the emotion they landed on. This engaging game format supported emotional literacy, expressive language, and social interaction. It also encouraged empathy, as students learned to interpret and mimic each other’s emotional expressions. By integrating movement and digital play, this activity appealed to multiple learning styles and kept young learners actively engaged while reinforcing their understanding of emotional vocabulary.
Art Creation: Real and Digital (30-40 minutes)
Students expressed their current feelings through artwork using colored pencils, markers, and paint. This process fostered self-expression, fine motor control, and decision-making, while encouraging children to reflect on their emotional states through artistic choices.
Then, with guided instruction, we used pc and tablets to create emotional drawings digitally in Canva using AI prompts. This helped them gain early digital design skills and understand how traditional and digital media can coexist.
As an extension, we introduced Leonardo AI, a tool that generates visual representations based on written prompts. Students described their feelings using simple words, and we explored the AI-generated images together. This activity provided a springboard to discuss the differences between human-created and machine-generated art. Children began to grasp the concept that while AI can follow instructions and generate images, it lacks feelings and personal experience—the very things they use to inspire their artwork. This contrast deepened their appreciation for their own creative process and sparked early conversations about how the human brain interprets emotion compared to artificial intelligence.
Collaborative Class Artwork (20 minutes per day for 2 weeks)
Each day, students recorded their emotional state by choosing and marking a color-emotion icon. We collected this data on paper and through a Google Form and a word file, which introduced children to basic data collection and categorization. At the end of the week, we used Canva to create a class digital mural called “Our Week of Feelings,” fostering a sense of community, shared expression, and basic understanding of visual data representation.
Emotion through Music and Dance (30 minutes)
Students listened to curated pieces of music representing different emotions and expressed those feelings through movement and dance. We used the following two videos:
(76) Μουσική και συναισθήματα – YouTube
This activity enhanced auditory discrimination, gross motor coordination, and emotional empathy. Children learned to interpret emotional cues in music and to express emotions physically. Have a look at the following video: https://youtu.be/Tvo_91QAs7s
In addition to dance, students were encouraged to express the emotions evoked by classical music through drawing. They listened to works by composers such as Chopin, Beethoven, and used crayons and colored pens to visually represent what they felt while listening. This combination of listening and drawing helped deepen their emotional understanding, supported creative expression, and encouraged children to think about how abstract sounds can translate into personal visual narratives. This activity enhanced auditory discrimination, gross motor coordination, and emotional empathy. Children learned to interpret emotional cues in music and to express emotions physically. Have a look at the following video: Listening to music and expressing through drawing
Creating Music with Photism (30 minutes)
In alignment with the original learning scenario, we introduced preschoolers to the Photism digital tool, which converts colors in an image into sound (Photism). After creating their emotional artworks, students used tablets to take photos of their drawings and uploaded them into the Photism app. They listened to the unique sounds generated by the colors in their pictures and explored how their emotions could be translated into auditory experiences. This activity supported auditory processing, curiosity about cause-and-effect relationships, and an early understanding of digital media’s creative potential. It also helped children reinforce the idea that feelings can be expressed and interpreted through multiple sensory modalities.
Music Creation with Digital Tools (40 minutes)
Children experimented with Google Arts & Culture’s experiments to generate sounds based on shapes and colours, and used the Makey Makey Piano app to create simple melodies expressing sadness and happiness. These activities introduced them to basic sound-mapping concepts, cause-and-effect in technology, and creativity in composing music, while supporting technological curiosity and problem-solving.
Google Arts & Culture creations: https://youtu.be/lU685Pmvg08
Makey-makey music creations: https://youtu.be/mTZmHV-VJa8
Pixel Emotions and Micro:bit (40 minutes)
Using digital pixel art tools, children drew expressive emoticons, which developed digital literacy, pattern recognition, and symbolic expression. With Micro:bit, they created pixel faces using LED matrices. This activity introduced coding logic and spatial awareness while strengthening their understanding of digital tools and emotional cues.
Photography and Game Creation (30 minutes)
Students used tablets to take photographs of their peers expressing various emotions. This taught basic photography skills, framing, and digital media use. We printed the images to create a memory-style card game, promoting visual memory, categorization, and cooperative play through emotion recognition.
Teachable Machine AI Training (30 minutes)
With teacher support, students uploaded their emotion photos into Google’s Teachable Machine to train a basic AI model to recognize emotions. This introduced foundational AI concepts, digital categorization, and helped children grasp how machines can learn patterns from images. It promoted curiosity, computational thinking, and awareness of emerging technologies.
Here is our trained AI model: https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/models/7W8y5C7i7
Interactive Storytelling on Emotions
We also co-created an interactive, nonlinear digital story using Twinery.org. Children contributed characters, emotional situations, and possible reactions, which we connected using clickable paths. This branching narrative allowed students to explore how different emotional responses can change a story’s outcome. It fostered imagination, sequencing, early digital storytelling skills, and an understanding of emotional consequences and empathy.
Emotion Maps with Bee-Bot
We also used Bee-Bots to integrate coding and storytelling with emotional literacy. Students created mini-maps featuring locations where different emotional events might happen. For this activity, we used mini paper Bee-Bots and direction cards with arrows, which allowed children to physically plan and visualize the Bee-Bot’s journey before programming it. They programmed the Bee-Bot to travel between these spots and told short stories about how the Bee-Bot character felt and what it did in each situation. This activity combined spatial awareness, logic, programming, narrative development, and emotional awareness, reinforcing both STEM and SEL skills in a playful, hands-on way.
Anti-Bullying Poster Activity
To close our emotional literacy unit with a focus on empathy and kindness, we engaged the students in creating a classroom poster against bullying. After discussing what bullying looks and feels like, students shared stories and examples of kind behaviors. Each child contributed a drawing or phrase that represented caring, inclusion, or standing up for friends. These were assembled into a large, colorful poster displayed in the classroom to reinforce a daily message of kindness and respect. The activity emphasized empathy, emotional communication, group collaboration, and the importance of being an upstander. It also gave children a voice in promoting a safe and positive classroom environment.
Outcomes for the students
The students experienced a holistic development journey through this richly layered and interdisciplinary learning scenario. They enhanced their emotional intelligence by identifying, naming, expressing, and discussing a wide range of feelings through visual arts, storytelling, physical expression, and music. By connecting emotions with colors and actions, they developed deeper emotional literacy and increased empathy. Their artistic abilities and fine motor skills flourished through both traditional and digital mediums as they moved seamlessly between crayons and platforms like Genially, Canva, and Leonardo AI. Musical activities cultivated appreciation, emotional sensitivity, and kinesthetic awareness, while tools like Photism and Makey Makey opened doors to digital music creation.
Technological exploration through Micro:bit, Teachable Machine, and digital photography introduced foundational concepts of coding, machine learning, and digital media literacy. Activities like the Genially dice game, interactive storytelling, and Bee-Bot maps strengthened social-emotional learning (SEL), early computational thinking, and narrative development. The anti-bullying poster project allowed students to synthesize these emotional insights and advocate for kindness and inclusion, encouraging them to be thoughtful, expressive, and empathetic community members.
Outcomes for the educator
As an educator, this experience demonstrated the transformative impact of integrating emotional intelligence, technology, and creativity into early childhood education. It affirmed young learners’ capacity to engage with sophisticated tools and abstract ideas when instruction is thoughtfully scaffolded. I witnessed students become confident communicators, empathetic collaborators, and curious problem-solvers. The use of Europeana resources, along with complementary tools like Genially, Canva, Leonardo AI, and Micro:bit, broadened my instructional toolkit and sparked new pedagogical possibilities. Most importantly, it reinforced that emotional development and digital fluency are not separate goals, but interconnected paths to meaningful, joyful, and inclusive learning.
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PDM 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Rijksmuseum.