It seemed pretty obvious to use Andy Goldsworthy's work as a model for our project. While we ate our snack after arriving, we watched a scene from the documentary about him where he builds a circular object out of sticks. The video was on mute because I thought I would best capture the attention span of two to five year olds if we discussed what was on screen while watching it. I asked the students what they thought he was making. The kids said it looked like a beaver home. I asked how many sticks they thought he used (they agreed on 100 or so) and what was going to happen to the structure. One student said he believed that beavers would take it over and live in it, right when we watched it start to break apart and float away in the river. I asked what they thought Andy Goldsworthy was thinking about when he watched his artwork floating away. They said they thought he was sad, watching it go away. I asked if it was okay if he was a little bit sad. This got no response so I introduced the idea that some art is made just to be temporary, because the artist just likes making it, and that not all of our artwork is meant to last forever, but it's still important that we make it.
We then went outside to the empty lot next to our building with the branches and sticks that I collected in the woods over the weekend. The only request that I made was that our project involve a circle somehow. The students had trouble understanding that we were making one big group project, and ended up working on their own segments which devolved into working on their own pieces altogether. They also used the grass as a flat surface, like a piece of paper, on which to make a flat “drawing” with the sticks, so I encouraged them to pile them up and make it three-dimensional.
One student made a cow. He said it was his father as a cow, which I thought was pretty profound.
A two-year-old student made a bird's nest. It was a very realistic bird's nest.
