Combine natural, sensory materials, art, math and a little meditation and make some pretty flower mandala designs.
Flower mandala designs for children
A mandala is a circular symbol, often seen in Hinduism and Buddhism, which represents the universe. It can be used as a focus for meditation, and making one is very calming and centring.
You can use any materials you like to make a mandala, indoors or outside. They are a great art activity in a forest classroom.
Ready-made forest school lesson plans
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A forest classroom is a place of adventure, discovery, and imagination. It can also be a wonderful place to learn about math and science, explore art and crafts, and develop language and social skills.
The Forest Classroom is a practical guide which will show you how to engage your children in fun and educational forest-school activities.
These ready-made forest school lesson plans are suitable for forest school leaders, teachers, childcarers and parents with children aged 4 to 10, to learn in a forest, school nature area, local park or your own backyard.
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Mandalas often use symmetry, repeating patterns, fractions and concentric designs, making them a wonderfully creative way to play with math concepts. They’re quite addictive too. Once you get started you could try:
:: play dough mandalas with petals
:: play dough mandalas with beans
Today we’re using flower petals and contact paper to make suncatcher mandalas.
Start by drawing out a frame on a piece of card. Traditionally mandalas are circular, but you could use a square, rectangle, flower, or heart shape.
Place your card frame on a piece of contact paper (sticky backed plastic), trim round the outer circumference with scissors, and you’ve made your sticky canvass on which to create your mandala design.
Then you’ll need some flowers. We picked a few from our garden classroom, but you could use weeds or wild flowers from a nature walk, or buy some especially for your project. You don’t need very many, as you will be using individual petals for your designs, and you can use any colour combination that appeals to you.
Using flowers in art brings another sensory dimension to the project. We used cornflower, calendula, nasturtium, dianthus, rosemary, ferns and alchemilla mollis (lady’s mantle) and mint, and the smell was wonderful.
Carefully separate your flower petals and then you can begin to design your mandala wheel.
You could divide your circle into fractions and fill each with a different flower.
Or play with symmetry.
Or make concentric circles or repeating patterns. A great thing about working with contact paper is that you can gently peel flowers off and replace them, changing your mandala design until you are happy with it.
Once you have created your finished design, stick another layer of contact paper over the petals, so they are encased inside. Then you can place your flower mandalas in the window and watch how the light shining through them really makes the flower petal colours sing.
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Very exciting activity!!!
How do you stick the mandalas to the window?
We used sticky blu-tack on the frames.
Fantastic idea thanks for sharing
I think this is a wonderful idea and it would be a great way for children to use the circles for cutting out activities. We love to go out for nature walks and I am wondering about the rules around picking wildflowers. Did you use flowers from the hedgerow or gardens please?
Thank you for sharing this wonderful idea.
Hi Amanda. We usually use flowers from our own garden, but if we’re collecting any from the meadow or forest we’d follow general foraging guidelines: picking only what we recognise and know to be safe; not taking anything rare, endangered or protected; not taking many, not all from the same plant, and ensuring we leave the rest of the plant unharmed. The Woodland Trust has guidelines here: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/things-to-do/foraging/foraging-guidelines/
Excellent idea, i will share it with my community
Thank you 🙂
Is there a way to keep the flowers from getting moldy?
Hi Laura. You could press the flowers first and use the dried petals.
Thank you. I love this idea, I did this last year and they ended up moldy after about a week. I was hoping their was something I could spray on them to preserve a little longer. Thank you for your help!
Could you place the flowers on laminating sheets, laminate then have the children cut the circles and frame. So one session making their design, takeaway and laminate then the children can cut out, frame and hang.
Hi Neil, Yes you could split this in to two sessions. The only thing I would be worried about would be the children’s designs moving/spoiling while they were being taken away. So, perhaps have a clear area where the children can lay their mandalas flat, or use contact paper/sticky backed plastic instead of laminating sheets, which have that in-built stickiness to hold the flowers and leaves in place.