A collective mandala project
with 420 elementary students

Vignir Jonsson (Viggi) is an art teacher at a primary school in Reykjavik, Iceland. He wrote to The Mandala Project and told us about a project that he and five other teachers did with their students. Here is what Viggi says about the experience:

For one week in March, students do all sorts of projects connected to different cultures of the world. I thought this would be a perfect time to get the whole school, 420 kids, involved in Mandala making. As it turned out there were around 400 kids who made their own Mandalas.

There were 4 of us teachers that divided the students among us after I had told the other teachers (almost) everything I knew about Mandalas and the creation of Mandalas, using your website as my main source and of course your book "Mandala, Journey to the Centre".

We started each session by explaining to the kids what Mandalas are, the meaning of the word, the meaning of Mandalas in different cultures and other interesting stuff about the subject.

Then the kids made their own Mandalas, cut them up into 4 pieces and gave their friend two of the pieces but received two pieces themselves. Then they glued the pieces together and put them on a construction (rainbow-colored) paper. Lastly we tied 21 Mandalas together with white ribbons and hung them up in the school hall.

All were very enthusiastic about the Mandala creation, not least of which were the teachers themselves. One teacher told me that after coming home from work after the first day I had mentioned the Mandala project and told her some things I knew about the subject, her husband had asked her why she was smiling so much! She couldn't hide her enthusiasm!

After the week was over, we the teachers made our own Mandalas, cut them up and divided them between ourselves, glued the pieces together and made a card from them, as a reminder of a fun week/project. Hope you like the pictures.