Sunday, March 17, 2013

Mindmapping with Kindergarten

We love to introduce new iPad apps to our kindergarten students. We try to think of apps that they can create with that will also help encourage their written language as well as foster some basic reading skills.

As part of the themed learning, our kindergarten students have been learning about food groups. As a centre activity we thought it might be a good idea to ask them to sort some food into the different groups. We wondered about how we could document this to show their progress. The iPad camera would come in useful for this activity to take photos of their choices.


We used Popplet to build a simple mind-map using the iPad and its camera. The students used printed pictures and a variety of plastic toy food to sort and choose from each of the four basic food groups.

We have the paid version of this app but the Popplet Lite version works just as well. The only catch with the free app is that you can only make one Popplet at a time.

The following images are the results of about 30 minutes of work with 8 students. The students did this with a partner and it worked really well. We also tried this same (or similar) activity with older buddy classes. The buddies were able to help the kinders get a lot more achieved in the same amount of time.



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