Mind maps for Younger Children

Mind maps provide opportunities for students and teachers to organize their thoughts using graphics. Younger children as well as adults benefit from the strategy of combining pictures, text, and spoken words to help organize thoughts and information.

Kidspiration meets the younger learner’s graphical organizer needs. It’s simple and easy to use.

Last night I participated in our first Kidspiration class. This class was designed, prepared and presented by our very own, fantastic Instructional Tech group. They have a reputation of doing things well and last night was no exception. They’ll be offering the Kidspiration class once a month for the remainder of the year. Primary Teachers will find the class extremely useful.

The team set up a blog for continued dialogue on the learnings that are happening in your class or from your experiences of Mind Mapping with students. They also put together a collection of great links to pre-made Inspiration and Kidspiration templates listed below.

Internet Resources for Kidspiration
Collected by Bloggin Betsy

Kidspiration Quick Tour

Atomic Learning provides specific tutorials for Kidspiration topics. Atomic Learning also provides lesson plans for using Kidspiration with students. Lesson plans can be downloaded from the Atomic Learning site.

Many school districts have websites that feature Kidspiration Templates created by teachers. Here are the resources that last night’s participants were given:

Coweta County Schools
Best subject area template site

Wacona Elementary School in Georgia
Good quality resources

Oswego City Schools in Oregon
Awesome Kidspiration Samples. No templates available to download

Global Classroom
Great Templates for K-2 and links to other template sites

North Canton City Schools
Good stuff!

Canby School District in Oregon
This site gives lesson ideas and shows sample activities.

50 Uses of Inspiration® and KidspirationTM

Instructional Technology’s Kidspiration Blog

Kent’s Orange Page

London Towne’s Page

College of Education at University of Oregon