Educator Tool: Using Visual Mind Mapping to Plan Daily Classroom Activities

A common challenge for classroom teachers is setting the daily activities schedule for their students. Teachers must make sure to include not only the academic lessons they want to teach, but time for lunch, art, and other creative activities necessary for a balanced school day. When organizing class activity schedules, teachers can find that using a Visual Mind Map may make this process a whole lot simpler. With a Mind Map, teachers can literally “map out” student activities from week to week using a creative and intuitive form of spatial diagramming. This form of Mind Map diagramming is advantageous to more traditional forms of activity organization, because it allows for the use of pictures, colors, and other visual associations. As compared to a more linear listing of activities, these associations make it easier to conceptualize and recall the information contained therein. Thus, with Visual Mind Mapping, teachers have access to a tool that makes creating a daily classroom activity schedule incredibly simple and fun for everyone involved.

What are Visual Mind Maps and How Are They Created?

A Visual Mind Map is “a means of organizing information that allows individuals to create diagrams, pictures, and other graphic visuals in order to show the relationship between ideas or other types of information”. With a Visual Mind Map, the creator makes use of colors and symbols to construct the map and represent his or her ideas in a non-linear format. When creating a Visual Mind Map, the individual usually begins by showing the key concept or main idea of the information as a central image, located in the center of the map. Any themes surrounding the main idea are shown on “branches” that are attached to the central image. Subsequent themes of less importance are then attached to these branches using “child branches”, and so on. The resulting diagram is a “map” of the ideas and information presented that includes the images, visual graphics, and colors the individual associates with each of the themes and ideas.

Creating a Weekly Classroom Activities Schedule Using a Visual Mind Map

A teacher must plan out what activities her class will be involved in daily for the upcoming week. She decides to use a Visual Mind Map to plan these activities, and begins her map by placing a graphic illustration representing her class in the map’s center. She then divides her map into different sections, one for each day of the school week, via “branches” that she attaches to the central image. Using “child branches”, the teacher initially lists the academic lessons she needs to include in each weekday, as well as the time periods she intends to teach these lessons. When she has finished this step, the teacher can now easily see what time slots she has open each day for creative activities, as well as what lessons the students have prepared for that day. She can then fill in the remainder of each school day with activities that naturally correspond with the academic lessons she’s taught. For example, she realizes that, on Wednesday, she will be teaching a lesson on animals. She, therefore, decides to include on the same day an art activity where her students draw different types of animals. Throughout her map, the teacher makes sure to use visual images and colors that she associates with each activity to make the map more intuitive. Attached is a Visual Mind Map that exemplifies what the teacher’s map might look like.

Visual Mind Mapping as a More Intuitive Form of Classroom Activity Planning

As the above example shows, the Visual Mind Map not only helped the teacher to plan her class’ weekly activities, but also allowed her to do so more intuitively. Because she was able to first “map out” the lessons she intended to teach and their time periods each day, she was able to quickly see what time slots she still had open and what creative activities would most make sense with the lessons. In addition, the teacher’s map allowed her to organize each activity in a way that was easy for her to process, helping her to remember planned activities from day to day. By using Visual Mind Mapping, the teacher was, therefore able to efficiently and easily ensure that her students always have a productive school day.

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