Children from a Bolton primary school were given a brilliant experience as they took part in a school sculpture week.
Clarendon Primary School in Great Lever previously held a Natural History Museum event, where children at the school were tasked with learning about dinosaurs and linking it to a modern context.
The school’s most recent event, however, has been more art focused, with each class contributing to a new sculpture installation at the school, ending the week off with a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Each class was allocated a sculptor to learn about and a £50 budget to design and build their own class sculpture in the style of that sculptor.
Speaking on the trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, deputy head teacher Claire Coldwell said: “It was brilliant, it was so good and we were so lucky with the weather being as it is.
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“As a school we pride ourselves on paying for opportunities for our children to visit places that they would probably never visit with their families. We took 361 children from our Year 1 to Year 6 classes.
“Our school sits in an area where there are significant levels of child poverty and deprivation; 397 of our children live in the top 20% of deprivation across multiple deprivation factors in Bolton.”
She added: “We had children travelling on the coach saying ‘miss, an actual sheep!’”
“They were able to get right up and close to all the sculptures, the scale of them is really astronomical.
“We had visitors that were there commenting on how well our children were commenting on the pieces, saying things like ‘this is not like my sculpture because Henry Moore’s style is curvy, while this has straight lines.’”
Ms Coldwell said: “Each class was given a £50 budget for the sculptures, and they had to be weatherproof so they’ll last forever.
“They had a week making the projects, then a small team of us teachers spent two weeks physically installing them.
“The quality of the installations was amazing.
“What they learnt is phenomenal in what they can talk about with regards to the arts.”
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