Any teachers investing in or using Lego?

[segreto]

I have been teaching English for 15+ years, and have found a few way to use Lego bricks in lessons, but it was not until I stumbled upon this site that I started really collected them.  I am teaching a financial literacy class this fall, and I plan on using the ideas on this site as a basis for buying and trading stocks.  I also buy Lego for my kids, but now I am buying much much more.  

 

I also sell lesson plan on Teacherspayteachers.com , and I cannot recommend the site enough for teachers looking to both buy and sell lesson ideas and manipulatives.    Of course my own site www.anderchunking.com shows how I use that site and Minecraft to teach English.  I hope to develop some good plans involving the buying and selling of Lego, as my students can do that without opening a stock market account and actually make money.

 

For the classroom, I have been using Donorschoose.org as a way to get funding for basic Lego blocks for classroom activities, too.  I know there is a huge wealth of educational ideas for Lego bricks, and I am sure I will never gather all of them.

 

[CNH1974]

Interesting, I just sold a 1/3 kg of bricks and the address was Kilmore Primary School. I wonder if they for her or the kids?

[comicblast]

Very interesting. I do remember playing with LEGO's while in grammar school, but their main purpose was to occupy us while our teachers too a breather. I can imagine LEGO's being quite helpful in the math or science fields to give visual examples of lessons, but do you are to explain how you use bricks to teach English?

 

The only thing I can think of is this:

 

Teacher - "This 4x2 LEGO brick represents a subject, this 2x2 represents a verb, and this 2x3 represents an object. Please rearrange these bricks to form a sentence."

 

Lame, I know, but the best I can think up! 

[MartinP]

Very interesting. I do remember playing with LEGO's while in grammar school, but their main purpose was to occupy us while our teachers too a breather. I can imagine LEGO's being quite helpful in the math or science fields to give visual examples of lessons, but do you are to explain how you use bricks to teach English?

 

The only thing I can think of is this:

 

Teacher - "This 4x2 LEGO brick represents a subject, this 2x2 represents a verb, and this 2x3 represents an object. Please rearrange these bricks to form a sentence."

 

Lame, I know, but the best I can think up! 

With your example, you can create an infinite possibilities of sentences.

[segreto]

Very interesting. I do remember playing with LEGO's while in grammar school, but their main purpose was to occupy us while our teachers too a breather. I can imagine LEGO's being quite helpful in the math or science fields to give visual examples of lessons, but do you are to explain how you use bricks to teach English?

 

The only thing I can think of is this:

 

Teacher - "This 4x2 LEGO brick represents a subject, this 2x2 represents a verb, and this 2x3 represents an object. Please rearrange these bricks to form a sentence."

 

Lame, I know, but the best I can think up! 

Yea, that's pretty much right on.  What I do is:  Red=noun, blue=verb, yellow=adj.... etc.   Then I give the kids a small building to analyze, and they have to make a sentence from the parts.  After that, I give them a sentence, and they have to build a building from the parts.  The last thing I do is give them a sentence with a specific idea or topic, like love or war, and they have to construct something using the correct Lego bricks that represents the idea like a heart or a gun.. though my administration frowns on the guns...

[MartinP]

Yea, that's pretty much right on.  What I do is:  Red=noun, blue=verb, yellow=adj.... etc.   Then I give the kids a small building to analyze, and they have to make a sentence from the parts.  After that, I give them a sentence, and they have to build a building from the parts.  The last thing I do is give them a sentence with a specific idea or topic, like love or war, and they have to construct something using the correct Lego bricks that represents the idea like a heart or a gun.. though my administration frowns on the guns...

I was thinking like that. I remember getting yelled at by a teacher because I drew a gun in my notebook.

[comicblast]

Yea, that's pretty much right on.  What I do is:  Red=noun, blue=verb, yellow=adj.... etc.   Then I give the kids a small building to analyze, and they have to make a sentence from the parts.  After that, I give them a sentence, and they have to build a building from the parts.  The last thing I do is give them a sentence with a specific idea or topic, like love or war, and they have to construct something using the correct Lego bricks that represents the idea like a heart or a gun.. though my administration frowns on the guns...

Very cool. I think that this is a great idea for learning. It makes it interesting and fun, but you also learn how to formulate correct sentences, and uses creativity to construct the main idea.

 

With your example, you can create an infinite possibilities of sentences.

Is that not what language is? It's basically rearranging different sounds with meanings behind them to project a larger idea. Though, of course, there is a limit of the words you can use, but you can always add multiple adverbs, adjectives, nouns, prepositions, tenses, etc.

[segreto]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZJ6wNtJVo

 

Here's a video of how I used Minecraft.  Kind of in the same area as using Lego bricks for colors=parts of speech.

[Guest eightbrick]

I believe Scissorino is a teacher and mentioned using Lego for classroom learning and play. I bet he's the most popular teacher in the school

 

I would say Lego would be best used for math and stuff, possibly as a replacement for those other blocks schools sometimes use. Maybe even design studies or visual arts. At my old school several people used Lego for projects and stuff. Saw my fair share of amateur animations that people did for videos.

[TheOrcKing]

If I suggested using Lego in any way, shape, or form to my teachers when I was in school as a way to learn, it would have more than likely been rejected. It is reassuring seeing how much openminded things are becoming in terms to learning tools. I mean, we want each generation to do better than the preceding one, don't we? I still remember reading how a school somewhere in Shangai, China uses the free third party tool, Doom Builder, to teach stuff like basic geometry, level design, using a computer program, etcetera. Amazing...

[TheDarkness]

Every classroom I worked in last year had a box of Lego. Schools use them as examples for maths concepts; shapes, symmetry, design, counting, etc. 

[segreto]

Sadly, here in the states, we adopted this thing called Common Core Standards, and they are all related to the skills chosen in a survey by 12 different professions.  It's very sad.  When a teacher thinks of something creative to do in the classroom, it most likely does not have any firm link to the standards we have to teach, though one might find some loose links.  Sir Ken Robinson is a true inspiration to me, and I hope we in the states take some of his anti-limited standards to heart.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Out-Our-Minds-Learning-Creative/dp/1907312471

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

[Scissorino]

Hey, yeah I'm a teacher too. I teach 10/11 year olds and in the UK we now have to do a grammar test - am definitely going to use this idea of building sentences; it's brilliant!

I have just bought the new Mindstorms for my class this year as well ICT curriculum is getting trickier to teach without being able to program and control.

I intend to use Lego a lot this year as my group are very into it. I'll use it to stimulate ideas for writing creatively, I'll use it in maths to replace the standard blocks etc we use... And I hope to find many more ways as the year goes on.

I want to start a multi-age Lego club too (many schools do this) but just need to work out how to get a whole load of Lego to get things going.

We are privileged to be able think and teach creatively using our own talents and interests.