Teaching with Ticia: Using Legos in your school

Legos have many uses in classrooms.  Aside from just being fun to build with and great for spatial reasoning, there are also many ways you can use them in your classroom or home as a learning experience.

The most common way we use them in our school work is to reenact stories, history lessons, or Bible stories.

All you have to do is have a large collection of figures and various other Legos to be able to build the story and act it out.  Fun, simple, and a great way to get that story in your memory.

Another advantage of Legos is problem solving and figuring out how to "make it work."  Pose problems to solve using the Legos.  For example, Bob has a garden and wants to plant red, yellow, blue, and orange plants.  He can't put the red next to the orange plants, how can he plant them best?

Legos are also great for inventing things.  Can you make an air vehicle?  If you were to create a boat what would be on it?  What is the fastest race car you can make?

If you're just using them for a bit of "educational fun" just have at it.  To make it a bit more of a learning experience and to force them to slow down and think it through, have them draw out their steps or what is required of it.

This put a little more thinking in their processes, and also if you're trying to keep standards (in Texas they're called TEKS), adds in a writing component to you history, science, or logical thinking activity.

And finally, another great method: math.  You can use them as a fun manipulative for teaching different math problems.

Count the bumps on them, add the bumps on the pieces together, find the area, find the perimeter.  The ideas are endless.  This is one I'm thinking of using with my kids as we travel in a month or so.

Have you ever used Legos as a learning tool?  What are your favorite ideas?

Tweet

Pin It Now!