Teaching with Legos

Ok friends, I really had planned on posting this topic yesterday, but I got sucked up into the whole 'ER' mania. What can I say, I love ER!

Ok, back to our topic, Legos! How many of you have children (big and small, boys and girls) that are obsessed with Legos? I have boys that eat, breathe, and sleep Legos! If they had their way, that's all they would focus on! Well as a special treat for our youngest son, we mix up his lessons and twice a week we have Lego day (dss is in ps).

I know what you are thinking: Lego day...he gets to play with his legos and build cool creations..well yes and no. He's having fun, but he's also learning (see how sneaky I am :-) ). Right now we are working on multiplication, so we use the Legos as a manipulative and he learns his problems using Legos. Let's say we are working on a problem...12 x 4, he takes his 4 groups of 12 different types of Legos, counts them out, and builds something cool with the blocks, then we turn it into a division problem and he solves the problem by demolishing his creation. Pretty cool, right? But wait, that's not all! Did you know you can teach just about any subject using Legos?

Here are some ideas to use with teaching Legos:

Music

Get a set of Legos of various length. The various lengths will represent a whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes. Show the longest Lego and tell them it represents a whole note because you can put 4 quarter legos on top of it. Pick up the half length lego, ask them how many will fit on the whole note and have them demonstrate. Continue to go through all of the sizes until your child has a good grasp of the different types of notes, then let them lose and see what kind of song they can create with their Legos.

English

Using Legos to construct sentences. Make up a key with different color Legos. Each color should represent different parts of the sentence (subject, noun, adjective, verb, pronoun - for older children, independent clause, dependent clause, punctuation, conjunctions, etc). As the child reads the sentence, have the child duplicate the sentence using Legos by picking out the various parts of speech and replacing them with the correct corresponding Lego color. Sure, it's school work, but it's fun too!

Geography

Find places of interests around the world, have child try to build a replica and looking at a map, correctly place their replica in the city or country in question.

Legos is a trade-marked name.