Words have colour; words paint. That is not merely a pretty phrase — it is the reason art and reading almost always end up inside the same activity in our workshops.
Research shows that engaging with art and literature has a strong effect on children's cognitive and emotional development. They build communication skills and learn to think both creatively and critically — two things that sound opposed but in fact support each other: to make something new, you first have to look carefully at what already exists.
What matters most, though, is the expression. A child who has both the word and the colour at hand has two ways of saying what they feel, and if one seems too hard on a given day, the other is still there. A drawing about a story that has been read shows what the child understood from the text better than any comprehension question. And a story written from a picture asks them to turn what they see into order, into causes and consequences.
That is what we are after in every workshop: not a pretty piece of work at the end, but a child with the means to voice their ideas and feelings in a positive, constructive way. The rest — the steady hand, the vocabulary, the courage to show what you have made — comes along the way.
About the after-school programme: https://pluskids.ro/en/after-school