?Respect-What is it

Respect – Prep Brainstorming & Mind Mapping: 5 & 6 Year Olds are Switched On!
respect-What is it? How do we show it? Why do we need it?When do we use it? We have been looking at our school attitudes. One of our attitudes is respect and today we started unpacking what it is. We’ve talked about respect and I’ve used the word many times but we haven’t focussed on it. The children worked in small groups to converse about and record their collective thoughts about respect. Large sheets and textas were provided for the children. Large sheets allow young children to have room to stand and work together.

After the groups were given time to brainstorm and record each group shared their ideas with the class. Ideas were then recorded as a class mind map. This helps the children organise their thoughts so they can clearly see how their ideas connect to each other. We then matched our school values to each branch. We have been unpacking these values all year and I think their understanding is developing well. Tomorrow, we will write a whole class essential agreement for respect as it is such an important attitude to really understand. I know it’s nearly the end of our school year in Australia but my Preps are so switched on at this time of the year. I wish we had a little more time…

I’ve included some photos of their brainstorming sheets and our class mind map. We are still adding to our mind map.




This is ‘risk taking’ writing. I wanted the children to feel they could write all ideas without fear of errors. This activity was about recording collective thoughts. Our mind map is developing well and I love the fact that on the ‘why?’ branch we recorded ‘good Australian’. We’re still developing this branch of our map. Mind maps are excellent for young children because they are very visual. I really enjoy listening to the children discuss their ideas and they way they accept all other ideas.

Cheers Nina