Culture Week was a special one for our young explorers of art.
We started from the basic question: what culture actually means and why it matters to each of us. With primary-school children, that kind of conversation quickly reaches concrete things — a poem you know by heart, a song you recognise from its first few notes, a painting you saw somewhere and never forgot.
We paid a virtual visit to the Romanian Athenaeum and were captivated by the beauty of the music and the architecture. We remembered Mihai Eminescu, our national poet, reciting and understanding his verses. The understanding part matters at least as much as the recital: a poem learned without meaning stays a string of sounds, whereas a stanza discussed word by word starts to mean something, and a child recites it differently the moment they grasp what it is about.
We painted like the great artists, taking inspiration from the works of Nicolae Grigorescu — colours came to life under our brushes. Painting "after" a master is not copying but understanding from the inside why he chose a particular colour or a particular light; it is the best way there is of looking closely at a painting.
And alongside all this, we practised Comper tests every day for Friday's competition.
Every day was a lesson in beauty, meant to open the children's way towards knowledge and creativity.