In today’s world, households with both parents working are common. As a result, those in charge of family meals must balance planning them with busy work schedules and little time to do so. For these parents, having an organized format to plan meals ahead of time is extremely helpful and time saving, and a Visual Mind Mapping tool may be just the thing they need. With Visual Mind Maps, parents can organize a week’s worth of family meals into one, highly creative, and conceptual diagram. In addition, parents can make use of the colors, images, and spatial layout Visual Mind Maps offer to make meal planning easier and more intuitive. Therefore, busy parents can use Visual Mind Maps to make the process of organizing the family daily meals something they can effortlessly fit into their schedules.

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 would usually begin by showing the key topic or main idea of the information as a graphic 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.

Planning Meals for the Upcoming Week Using a Visual Mind Map

A busy parent has been struggling to stay on top of planning delicious and nutritious meals for her family. She, therefore, decides to ease her struggle by using a Visual Mind Map to help her plan meals for the upcoming week. She begins constructing her map by placing a representative image in the map’s center. She then divides the map into sections representing each weekday via “branches” that she attaches to the central image. The parent then asks her family members to suggest food items they would like to eat during the week and lists the items on “child branches”. She continues listing suggested items on the “child branches” until she has a grouping of items for each day that make a complete meal. Throughout the Visual Mind Map, the parent uses colors and images to make the meals easier for her to conceptualize and remember. When she has completed her map, it may look similar to the attached Visual Mind Map diagram.

A Successful Week of Family Meals Thanks to the Visual Mind Map

Each day during the following week, the parent has no trouble preparing meals for her family. Having “mapped out” in advance what the family will eat each day, she now finds she can easily take care of doing so. The map’s spatial layout makes consulting the map for the each day’s meal simple, and the highly associative visuals in the map make remembering what items to pick up easy. The result, for the parent, is a stress-free week of ensuring her family gets daily nutritious meals that they all enjoy. The parent, thus, finds Visual Mind Mapping a perfect solution to her once problem of figuring out what her family will eat.

 

Whether babysitting for the afternoon, or dealing with children on break for an entire summer, adults looking after kids are constantly in search of constructive activities with which to engage them. Planning activities ahead of time seems to be the most effective way to make sure any time spent with children goes smoothly and is fun for everyone involved. Yet, the question often arises for parents and adults of how to come up with enough planned activities to fill up the time. Visual Mind Mapping can be extremely helpful for adults looking to plan constructive, kid-friendly activities; with a Visual Mind Map, adults can literally “map out” each activity in a spatially formatted and intuitive diagram. Moreover, they can include in this diagram any graphics or images they associate with each activity to make working with the map more intuitive. The result is, thus, a neatly organized list of activities, formatted in a way that allows adults to creatively and efficiently plan for doing these activities with children. Parents and adults will, therefore, find they will have no trouble filling an entire day with fun and engaging things for kids to do.

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”.¹ 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 topic or main idea of the information as a graphic 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.

Planning Constructive Activities for Kids Using a Visual Mind Map

Sara is at her wits’ end trying to come up with fun activities for her children to do while on Christmas break next week. She has consulted books and magazines full of kid-friendly suggestions, but, to no avail -- she is still unable to come up with a concrete list of activities for her kids to do. Sara now decides to try organizing her thinking around possible activities for her kids using a Visual Mind Map, and she begins constructing her map by placing a representative visual in the map’s center. She next lists the names of each of her children on “branches” that she has attached to the central image. She continues her map by listing, on “child branches”, any interests or hobbies each child has. It is at this point that Sara’s list of activities begins to finally take shape. From the multitude of magazine article suggestions, she picks kid-friendly activities that correspond to each child’s interests and hobbies, listing them on “twigs”. Throughout her Visual Mind Map, Sara also uses images and colors that she associates with each activity to make the activities easier to conceptualize. When she has finished, Sara has planned an entire week’s worth of things for her children to do on one map, similar to the Visual Mind Map attached.

A Calm and Fun Christmas Break Thanks to Visual Mind Mapping

Sara marvels at how smoothly this year’s Christmas break for her children is going. At this point in past years, would have found both Sara and her kids frustrated at the lack of things for them to do while on vacation. This year, thanks to her Visual Mind Map, Sara was able to plan fun and engaging activities for her children to do the entire time. Moreover, the intuitive layout of her map allowed her to focus her plans on activities that naturally flowed from the things each child likes to do most. She was, thus, able to sort through the maze of books and magazine articles to focus only on the suggested activities most likely to interest her children. Sara now finds that she can manage to survive school vacations without the worry of how to keep her children engaged.

1. Farrand, Paul; Hussain, Fearzana and Hennessy, Enid (May 2002). "The efficacy of the 'mind map' study technique". Medical Education 36 (5): 426–431.