LEGOmania!! Part A

 Why play Lego bricks in classroom? The answer is simple! Students, especially those of younger age, are highly acquainted with them, as they spend a lot of time creating and recreating their own reality through them.  Therefore, LEGOs provide teachers with a great educational tool which offers a wide variety of grammar and vocabulary challenges not to mention storytelling prompts which students are more than willing to get involved with. 


1) LEGO bricks can help students visualize many grammar rules and syntax structures which kids would find difficult and boring to deal with otherwise. You can teach syntax through LEGO bricks. You can use bricks of different size and shapes to create sequences as simple as Subject Verb Object in Affirmative structures to more complex ones such as comparative structures etc.


LEGO syntax structures

LEGO fun


2) LEGOs can be used to illustrate a story that is being taught in your lesson. You can ask students create a scene with your LEGO characters so as to depict the main scene from the story taught in your equivalent lesson.

3) Talk about characters. You can present some LEGO figures or playmobil characters and engage your students in external appearance description and then move to possible character and feelings analysis. A nice activity would be to take a photo of these characters and apply different filters on through the use of a photo editing application. Then you can ask students make guesses about the characters' feelings in different situations. Take a look for example:

Feelings of love and happiness

Feelings of sadness and mystery
Memories???

Sparkles sparkles!! Oh what a day!!







4) Moreover LEGOs can inspire students create their own story. You can have the activity both ways. You can either set up a scene using LEGOs and ask students to come up with a story or you can even get students split in two parts and have the first group organise a scene and the second one write a story about it and next have them exchange roles.
These students-made Lego-Scenes stories can lead to deep storytelling activities. Students may combine different story parts created daily at school and create a school newspaper or a school novel. A highly inspiring activity would be to create a school blog-spot that would be refreshed with a new LEGO-inspired story part on a daily basis. The next step would be to create a short film using a user friendly application that would develop your photos of these scenes into a film.

Stay tuned! Part B is about to follow!
Good luck!
Maria P.!


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