Art teachers select OneTree as theme for school year

Art specialist DeAnn Moore demonstrates an art project based on the OneTree theme at Woodriver Elementary.

The SNRAS program OneTree has been selected as the theme for the fall semester by the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Art Center.

Each year the Art Center staff choose a project around which to develop and test curriculum. Each of the center's five art specialists develops one or two grade-level lesson plans; then they travel as a team, field testing the lessons in every kindergarten through sixth grade classroom. Teachers work alongside the visiting Art Center specialists to learn how to do the lessons.

Art Center Director Karen Stomberg began working with OneTree two years ago. She said, "The lessons the art center folks created this fall are lovely; good art and good science and very connected to OneTree in philosophy."

Stomberg said the art specialists made the group decision to focus on birch art and science as a direct result of their involvement in OneTree as artists, creating and showing artwork in two shows and attending OneTree workshops.

The eight lessons they created will become part of the permanent collection of art kits circulating through the Art Center's library and the lesson plans will be available online.

Art specialists taught two workshops on the OneTree curriculum at the FNSBSD teacher in-service training in May and introduced it during the second Fairbanks Arts Institute, a two-week intensive statewide teacher training this past summer.

"There is an influence of project OneTree in all of these activities, if not a direct correlation," Stomberg said.

"There has been a ripple effect and it is exciting to see," she said. "OneTree ideas have sent roots in many directions."

OneTree Coordinator Jan Dawe, a SNRAS adjunct forest sciences professor who spearheads this entire project, is just as excited as Stomberg. "When they introduce the art lesson, they tell classrooms that our birch is Betula neoalaskana--distinct from eastern U.S. paper birch," said Dawe. "For our local school children to know that is a dream come true. The art specialists have talked with thousands of pre-kindergarten through sixth grade students this fall, and they now know the scientific name for Alaska white birch. That's powerful."

OneTree began in July 2009 with the felling of a single birch in the Nenana Ridge forest. Artists, scientists, craftsmen and teachers were standing by to take pieces of the tree to study and use. "OneTree connects the community to the forest as active stewards," Dawe said. "It makes stewardship concrete one tree at a time."

A Woodriver Elementary School first grader works on a OneTree art project in Ms. Laurie Hueffer's classroom.

First graders at Woodriver Elementary pretend to be birch trees.

Further reading:

OneTree project spreads its branches into Fairbanks classrooms, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, April 5, 2010, by Nancy Tarnai

OneTree project grows, evolves, SNRAS Science & News, July 15, 2009, by Nancy Tarnai

One tree, lots of ideas, UAF Sun Star, Sept. 17, 2010, by Kelsey Gobroski