Piece by Piece
On Friday, our school welcomed a Metis artist named Brenda Collins. Brenda’s mother is of the Odawa Nation and her father is French.
Classes gathered in the library to help put together a Medicine Wheel Mosaic. It is also called The Four Directions or a Healing Circle. It is intergenerational. That means that each of the 4 colours of the Healing Circle represent either the child, youth, adult, or elders.The tiles in the centre are mirror tiles and that allows us to look at ourselves and reflect on our inner feelings and thoughts.
The green tiles at the bottom of the piece represent Mother Earth and blue tiles at the top represent Father Sky. The brown tiles around the border represent the 4 sacred smudging medicines: tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar.
The finished mosaic uses more than 6500 glass square pieces that are glued down. Each staff member and student helped to make the Medicine Wheel on Friday. Brenda will take it home and add any finishing touches.
This is what the finished product will look like:
As of June of 2018, there are 72 Medicine Wheels across the region. The one that we made as a school will proudly hang in our front hallway of our school.
A big thank you to Brenda for teaching us about the Medicine Wheel!
Take a look at the process:
Dear Mrs.Sullivan,
i really enjoyed making the medicine wheel the tiles were very cool looking. Do you think Brenda will come back so we can make somthing else? Do you know how many tiles were used to make the medicine wheel? thats all. have a good rest of your day!
Dear Joseph,
I enjoyed helping to make the medicine wheel, too! I’m not too sure about Brenda returning except to bring the medicine wheel back when she has finished with it.It takes 6500 pieces of tile to finish. Wow!
Mrs. Sullivan
Dear Mrs.Sullivan,
I love your class blog we loved doing the Medicine wheel with all
the Gr.3s. Where else in Canada does the Medicine wheel exist?
How popular is the Medicine wheel?
From Owen