After watching the story of The Noisy Paint Box, children voted on their favourite picture from the book as a stimulus for their P4C enquiry. This is the one they chose.

Next they thought of questions like ‘Why is Vasya sad?’ ‘Where are the colours coming from?’ ‘Why did he want the colours to jump and dance?’ and ‘Is the paint box magic?’ They decided to use the latter ‘Is the paint box magic?’.

To understand how Vasya felt about his colours and his artwork, we explored how the colours blue, yellow, red and green made us feel, what they made us think about and what noises and movements they would make. Children suggested red was like fire spitting and jumping around, blue was like drops of rain pitter-pattering, yellow was like the sun and the stars sparkling, shooting and fizzing like fireworks and the green was like grass waving and swishing. They put all this in to their own abstract paintings.

After discussing whether or not it was the paint box that was magic which made the colours move and make noise, the final conclusion was that the paint box is not magic because there is no magic in the world, it is just our imaginations.

What do you think? Is the paint box magic?