Woolslair Mosaic builds “a mosaic of community” as it teaches kids valuable skills

The room is quiet as little hands are busy. They’re cutting tile. Applying paste to colorful clay pieces, all shapes and sizes. Placing them carefully on a beautifully outlined design. The third graders at Pittsburgh Public Schools Woolslair PreK-5 are working hard to complete about a half dozen fun, fantastic mosaics that together form, as one explains, “a mosaic of our school and our community.”

It’s a wonderful project that’s happening this spring in Joseph McLaughlin’s class, located in the really cool building on 40th Street, on the border between Lawrenceville and Bloomfield. Joe is a veteran public school teacher – he has 23 years under his belt and seven at Woolslair – and he’s part of his school’s new STEAM focus. The historic school was slated to close two years ago, but parents, the school’s administration and community activists worked hard to keep Woolslair open. It was named a “magnet” school and is one of a handful around the city that is focused on STEAM education – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math.

The mosaic is a collaboration between Joseph and Laura Jean McLaughlin, a noted area mosaic artist whose work can be found all over the city – in places like Whole Foods in East Liberty, the Montessori School and other Pittsburgh Public Schools. You might have noticed that she shares the same last name as Woolslair’s third grade teacher, and you’re right: the two are brother and sister.

“My brother talked with me about a potential collaboration,” Laura Jean explains. She’s an artist-in-residence with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and when the opportunity to collaborate with her brother appeared, she jumped at the chance. The project is being supported by PCA and the STEAM initiative through PPS, and it brings together many different STEAM aspects.

“Each nine weeks we’ve been working on a project related to STEAM, so this project really pulls in a lot of different areas. It pulls in math when we were first measuring and deciding how the sections were going to be put together,” Joe explains. “Even cutting tiles, I’ve been talking about what shapes are these, because they’ve been learning about polygons and quadrilaterals and hexagons.”

The students are incorporating art as they complete the mosaic – they had a big hand in its design — and they’re going to do a personal narrative or writing piece when they’ve finished about their experiences.

“And it also pulled in what we’ve been doing at Arsenal Park at our last STEAM project on geocaching,” Joe adds.

Laura Jean is in residency with the kids for 10 weeks. The project began with the students playing “surrealist” games to “loosen them up creatively,” she says. She then showed them a presentation about different mosaics over the ages “and we talked about how something that they created or their story can last for a long time.” She taught them about clay, they did measuring and math, and they learned about their community and the surrounding area in preparation for their eventual mosaic.

“They all did drawings of what they thought should be in the mosaic, and then I took all their drawings and came up with a cohesive design using as many of their ideas as possible,” Laura Jean explains. “And then I drew it out and they helped paint it in.” When we visited, the class was busy breaking tiles and placing them on the mosaic, now in several sections.

“Since it’s focusing on community, the students came up with their ideas of what community is, so there are scenes of when we go to Arsenal Park, which is right down the street, there’s a school bus, the school is included, and we have some STEAM related items,” Joe adds. “Just a lot of things that they think go in together to make a community.”

The completed mosaic will hang by the school’s library, downstairs from their classroom. It’s large – it will measure 15 feet by 6 feet – and it will be a permanent fixture in the school.

“You’ll always remember what you did in third grade when you see it,” one little third grader observes. “I put that one in,” another adds, proudly pointing to his tiles.

“This is a pretty big project; it’s been a learning experience for me, too, but they love it and I keep telling them, you know when this is finished you’re going to see it on the wall, and say, I did that,” Joe says. “And we’re also going to be pulling in some students from other classes to add some tile so the whole school is going to be participating.”

This article originally appeared on WQED’s website for the Remake Learning Series, a multimedia partnership of NEXTpittsburgh, Pittsburgh Magazine and WESA.