Andy Goldsworthy Sculptures

With the year Fives and Sixes I wanted to run a project that was extremely hands on, involved using natural materials and taught the very important lesson of "it's ok to fail."

For the first two lessons we looked at videos and pictures of Andy Goldsworthys work within nature. I showed the students a video from the documentary "rivers and tides." In this clip Andy fails at making his sculpture. It falls from the tree. We discussed how we would act if our sculpture didn't work and why it was all about the process of the work, rather then the finished product. We also discussed why it was important to fail after we completed our project. Students responses were "I would not have made such a good sculpture had my first one worked" and "I had to think harder about how to get it to stand". These are very important conversations to have in order to build studentscritical thinking skills, that can come in handy in solving daily life problems! Yay for sculptures that allow students to be resilient to failure and to have the guts to keep trying. 

Some of the Finished works: