Mosaics were the “in” thing to do at two schools in Cook County this spring. Students at both Birch Grove Community School with its art teacher Natalie Shaw, and Jana Larson’s 4th graders at Sawtooth Elementary School have been working with mosaic expert Kelly Dupre to create beautiful mosaics about the North Shore.

The projects are quite different. Students at Birch Grove Community School worked on four different mosaic panels which will be installed on exterior walls of the building by the end of the month.

Larson’s class worked on mosaics that will be put on an interior wall in The Garage, the new artisan/community space in the old Chevrolet Building in Grand Marais. Those panels are set to be installed this summer.

Both projects were really fun to do, Dupre said, and offered different kinds of challenges to the students.

Jessa Wallendal, director of the Birch Grove Foundation, said a grant from the Lloyd K. Johnson Foundation made the project at Birch Grove possible. There were many components, and the entire student body was involved, she said.

The students were divided into four multi-age, multi-grade teams for the project. It was decided that the students should learn more about the history of Tofte before tackling their designs and so they visited the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum where they looked at old photos and learned how people lived here 100 years ago. Skip and Linda Lamb also brought in photos of the steamship The America, which plied the North Shore for years and brought the original settlers here.

Then each of the four groups worked with Dupre and Shaw on drawings for the murals and presented their ideas to the whole school. Four themes emerged: a dog-sledding panel, inspired by the stories of John Beargrease; a wildlife scene with moose and birch trees; The Steamship America and a mural about fishing with fish and buoys, nets and weights.

The best drawings were selected by the group as a whole as well as their teachers and the students began drawing them to scale and then putting the actual mosaic together on tables. Jeanne Wright, who teaches a mosaic class at North House with Dupre, came and helped, too, Wallendal said, and members of the community have been dropping by throughout the whole project.

“It’s been fun to watch them work on this,” she said. “We’ve really made sure it wasn’t just the older kids that made the decisions.”

There will be an official opening at 11 a.m. May 28, and the public is invited, she said.

Larson said her students are designing a mural with native trees as the theme. The 20-foot by 9-foot mosaic will depict lots of different trees in glass tiles. The actual mural will be installed in June and July, Larson said. Unlike the mosaic on the wall at the Whole Foods Co-op, this mural will be installed by adults, making the process a lot easier.