Many people with ADD learn better when they work visually. When asked to organize their thoughts into an essay or research paper, they may quickly become overwhelmed and lost. By using a Mind Map as a guide, however, students can approach study projects and writing assignments visually so that they are better able to stay focused and on the right path. Mind Maps provide a visual structure that enables the person with ADHD to literally see the relationships between ideas or steps more readily.
I am borrowing from an ADDitude Magazine article by Michael Sandler, founder of the Creative Learning Institute in Boulder, CO (www.thecreativelearninginstitute.com/) in order to give you a few basic guidelines for making your own Mind Map or helping your child create one. To view the entire article, click here (www.additudemag.com/adhd/article/764.html).
At its simplest, a mind map is a series of ideas connected to a central theme. If you're writing a paper, begin with the main theme in the center of the page, boxed or circled and represented by a picture or key word. Draw lines radiating from the main theme to create a second layer of related thoughts. Each of these might send out shoots to create a third layer, and so on, until you have a web of interrelated ideas that provide a logical structure for your paper. (Michael Sandler, ADDitude Magazine)
Here are the basic steps to create a Mind Map:
- Identify Important Themes: Using a large sheet of unlined paper, place the Central Idea at the center of the page and circle or box it in. Place related themes, topics or information around the Central Idea leaving room to add more information and details. Use key words, not sentences, and print as neatly as possible. Use different colored pens or markers to represent different themes.
- Add Details: Write in details relating to each theme near that theme. Capture the relationship by placing the detail in a way that makes sense to you. Use colors to keep related ideas visually connected.
- Look for Relationships: Again, using colored pens, draw arrows, dotted lines, symbols, and icons to help you make sense of the relationships among the various themes as well as their relationship to the Central Idea. Some themes are organized by time, others by location or people. These are examples of “organizing principles”. What “organizing principles” can you identify that link different parts of your map to one another?
- Move things around: Edit your Mind Map by redrawing it so that the arrows, lines, symbols, etc. you have been using are clearer. Feel free to play with themes by moving them around. Add cartoons or other humorous images to fix the ideas and their relationships in your mind.
Using the Mind Map to Study: Redrawing your Mind Map from memory is a great way to remember information for an exam. The visual cues will be an enormous help as you need to understand how ideas relate to the information you are expected to learn.
Using the Mind Map for Writing: Students with ADHD often have trouble expressing their ideas on paper because they get lost in their own heads. Ideas collide and get tangled in ways that make it hard to capture them. Using the Mind Map puts the ideas out in a simple, visual format that literally guides the student to write the paper. When required to submit an outline, using a Mind Map quickly gives the structure to generate an outline.
The value of Mind Maps for organizing one’s thoughts cannot be underestimated. And they have the added benefit of encouraging creative problem-solving. So have fun helping your child or yourself to make a Mind Map!
