This paper reports on a two-phase study conducted in two primary schools in Greece. The study attempted to bring together two different school subjects, art and music, through the collaboration of two researchers and artists, an illustrator and a musician respectively, and to explore possible ways of integration within the school curriculum. In this context, a three-month-long book making project was designed first informed by previous findings regarding book illustration (Phase A) (Nodelman, 1988; Lewis, 2001; Labitsi, 2007). It took place in a small sub-urban primary school of Attiki with a Year 4 (ages 9-10) class. After studying a collection of illustrated children’s books, analysing their visual material and meeting professional illustrators the children wrote and illustrated personal stories in their own hand-made books (Labitsi, 2008). These books became the basis for the realisation of the next stage of the study (Phase B), which took place in a primary school of Rhodes island with a class of same aged pupils. After getting familiar with three of the illustrated stories pupils worked in small groups in order to create a ‘soundtrack’ for each story using simple musical instruments and vocal sounds (Glover, 2000).

In the first phase, visual analysis of the children’s hand-made illustrated books was conducted. A model for studying visual narrative informed by theories of illustrated children’s literature and visual semiotics was employed (e.g. Nodelman, 1988; Labitsi, 2007). The analytical categories used included ‘book design and format’, ‘representational content’, ‘art style and media’ and ‘written and visual narrative interaction’. In the second phase, the analysis was based on the videotaped examples of children’s music making. The video analysis was informed by models of evaluation and assessment of musical creativity (e.g. Koutsoupidou, 2006) and examined children’s ability to create music with ‘meaning’, using certain musical elements of texture and structure, and demonstrating a relevance of the ‘soundtrack’ to the visual stimuli. In both phases the students’ evaluation comments of the process and products of the projects being involved were collected through individual and/or group interviews and analysed.

The analysis of both phases of the study focused on the identification of certain art and music skills and explored possible relationships between art and music development (Hargreaves,1989; Koutsoupidou, 2005; 2006). Ιt also explored the pupils’ opinions and feelings about extending the work of their peers. The paper suggests ways of integrating art and music in the primary school curriculum in order to facilitate better learning and to promote pupils’ communication among different schools.