Students at Birch Grove Community School have been hard at work, researching, designing and arranging tiles for a mosaic to be placed on an exterior wall of the Birch Grove Community Center in Tofte. Above left: Madysen McKeever, 11, and Jared DeHart, 11, work on laying the tiles for a dog musher and pine tree. Lower left: A mural at Birch Grove of course needs birch trees! Jacob Bjerkness, 10, carefully places the white and black tiles to create a birch tree. Lower right: Kindergartener Nathan Bilben adds blue tiles to give a moose an eye.
Birch Grove Community School students have been hard at work on a beautiful new addition to the Birch Grove Center façade. Thanks to a generous grant from the Lloyd K. Johnson Foundation, the BGCS students have been working with local artist Kelly Dupre and the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum to create four tile mosaic panels that will be displayed on an exterior wall at the entrance to Birch Grove.
The kids started planning the art project with a visit to the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum in Tofte to learn about local history and get ideas for the mosaics.
Skip and Linda Lamb of Schroeder also visited with the students about local history and brought photos from the Cross River Heritage Center.
Guided by artist/author Kelly Dupre, the students worked in multi-age groups to sketch their ideas, and developed their own processes for selecting their favorites. “My group looked at all the pictures and drew stars by the pictures we liked best,” said Airen Ramsdell, a first grader.
After a long process, the kids selected four ideas to represent local history: a birch forest and wildlife scene, a John Beargrease dog sledding panel, the Steamship America
and a fishing net and buoy.
“They’re all about our history,” said Dominic Highland, also in first grade.
Dupre enlarged the student drawings and combined sketches from each group into the four panels. The kids are now laying tiles on the full-size drawings. This also requires using a hammer to break the tiles into smaller pieces, the resounding favorite activity of the students so far. The next steps will be transferring tiles to cement board and painting and grouting to finish the project.
“This has been a great experience for our students, and a wonderful collaboration between the school, the foundation and area historical societies,” commented Natalie Shaw, K-1 and art teacher at Birch Grove.
Thepanels will be unveiled at the Birch Grove Community School graduation on May 28 at 10:00 AM. Everyone is invited to celebrate this community art project.
Birch Grove student Hazel Oberholtzer summed up the project, remarking, “I like that everybody can work together. We’re learning about Tofte history. I like all of it!”
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