While many people are dealing with the challenge of home schooling during the pandemic, it’s somewhat of business as normal in my home. My non-Lego Spouse (NLS) started home schooling my oldest kiddo (now age 6) back in September for Kindergarten. We go to a local school for specials (art, gym, and music), but the rest happens here in our home. My NLS has done some amazing work adapting to my kiddo and how she learns and it seems to be going well. I was initially worried I would come home from work and both would be in tears, but so far so good. The biggest challenge the pandemic has brought is no access to libraries to get books. We rely on libraries for material to use and not having it has forced my NLS to find reading materials online.
Last week was supposed to be the spring break for the local school kids and my NLS decided to have home school spirit week to spice things up since we were still in session. We took a trip to Vienna right before the pandemic kicked in and borders closed so that was our spring break. My NLS had pajama day, dress up fancy day, inside-out and backwards day, and a few other fun ones. Anyways I was challenged to host a day of my own and there’s no better way to teach than with my favorite plastic bricks! Here’s what I used as a lesson plan. Feel free to steal any of the material you want if you have a kiddo around the age of mine learning some of the same material.
Definitely post some of your own ideas in the comments or you can email them to me at store@bricksforbricks.com. Thanks!
DECORATIONS
I would have loved to have a huge scene of bricks covering everything, but I didn’t have a ton of time the night before to decorate. I took a few large bags from the brand store and then set up some sets around the school area as my decorations. As the teacher, I wore a brick themed outfit and proudly sported my Brickset t-shirt.
CHARACTER QUALITY
Each week starts with a different character quality and it gets discussed every day at the start of the school day. Sometimes there are books related to the quality or video clips. Other times it is just a discussion about how someone we know has shown one of those traits. My NLS uses the wall (shown below) to display the one for the week and keeps the previous ones up nearby.
I decided to use a video from the LEGO® Company titled “The LEGO® Story.” It’s a clip from 2012 that discusses the history of the company through the present day. It’s about 15 minutes long and I stopped it every 5 minutes or so to review what we saw and to relate some of the character qualities we observed. Resiliency came up as the company was able to survive two factory fires and continue to flourish despite losing everything twice. You could argue that the company made the founders sound pretty amazing in terms of how they did everything, but in the end I think it got the point across.
One quick note… around the 10:10 mark, one of the characters says a word that depending on how you’re raising your kid could shock them. You might want to preview it first just in case you are concerned. I don’t know if my kiddo knows that word and I didn’t want to find out just yet so I skipped over that part.
MATH
Next up was Math. We’re learning subtraction. I didn’t do so well preparing for this lesson, but the goal was to use bricks to help solve the problems. I built bricks in two layers and the goal was to figure out how many studs were showing on the bottom layer and then subtract the number showing on the top layer. If it was too challenging, she could just count the studs remaining that could be seen.
I failed in that my kiddo knew a bunch and didn’t need the bricks for some of the problems. Also I messed up on a few of the brick examples that I made (Dad can’t count).
On the plus side, having a 1x8 and a 1x6 brick made determining the bottom was 14 much easier so that part helped. It also helped to have the top made of smaller bricks (1x1 and 1x2) to help add them up quickly.
I probably should have tweaked it a little bit, but in the end, she got all of them right and my NLS didn’t give me any dirty looks while I was “teaching.”
Brain Break #1
My NLS has found that breaking up activities and moving around has definitely helped to get through the day versus powering through lessons. So I had to find fun things to do with bricks that would involve moving around and breaking up the lessons. Easy!
Brain Break #1 was a 2 minute build challenge and I was the challenger. The game was to see who can build the tallest tower that doesn’t fall down before the timer goes off.
I thought she would just start stacking, but she took her time selecting pieces and putting them on. After 2 minutes I was the winner. After 3 minutes, my 2-year old knocked my tower over and my 6-year old realized she could find bricks already stacked in the pile to get the tower much taller. I think if we were to repeat the challenge, it would be much different. Definitely a good break though.
Handwriting
We tackled handwriting next. I fully admit this is not my strong point as my writing is atrocious. Here’s what we did. My NLS read in a book that younger kiddos have trouble writing a lot and can tire from it easily. So sometimes we will have my kiddo tell us a story. My NLS will write it out and then my kiddo will pick a line or two to write out versus writing the full thing.
To connect this activity to the brick, I built a small scene on my brick table using #80105-1: Chinese New Year Temple Fair and #60234-1: People Pack - Fun Fair (pictured below). Then I made up a story as if I was one of the minifigures at the fair. My kiddo caught on quick and she picked a minifigure to be. She recited about eight sentences or so that I scribbled down. Then she picked a line and my wife wrote it out nicely (so she could actually read it). From there, my kiddo wrote it out on her lined paper and used much neater handwriting than I will ever have.
BRAIN BREAK #2
After some writing, we needed another break to shake things up again. My second game involved a cup full of minifigures. There were about 14 or so and I arranged them in different positions with their legs, arms, and heads all in different directions. I titled the game “Be a Minifigure” and started the game off with a discussion about what is different between minifigures and real people (no knees, no ankles, no moving elbows, etc.). From there we reached into the cup, pulled out minifigures, and did out best to copy their positions. My NLS took some pictures which I won’t put up because I look too goofy, but it was a lot of fun and there were a lot of laughs. I will include a few pictures of the minifigures we tried to replicate below for your enjoyment. You can try and match the position at home. We tried to do them all standing up, but for some you just had to lay down to match the position.
HISTORY AND SCIENCE
Our last lesson of the day was history. My NLS has been going through early history with my kiddo this year and about the time of my lesson they were working on ancient Rome. I decided to do an architecture lesson. I found some pictures online of ancient Roman structures which included arches. She had done some talking about aqueducts before so we talked about how arches are stronger and how they are built with a keystone. I also showed some pictures of bridges without arches that were flat with lots of supports. I explained the difference between the two and how one needed a lot of supports and probably didn’t hold as much while the other held more (or at least the ones I showed did… I didn’t show modern bridges made of steel beams).
Anyways to demonstrate, I built some simple bridges out of 2x4 bricks. I tried to build them like the flat bridge with the supports and then a bridge with arches. It wasn’t 100% accurate, but it showed the concept. From there I used some dumb bells to demonstrate the strength (okay so they did this on LEGO Masters US too, but what we did was slightly different). The arch-like bridge was stronger than the straight bridge with the supports. The collapsing was enjoyed too.
We did a quick lesson on how to make the flat bridge stronger to include adding supports and attaching plates to the existing structure to make it stronger.
Overall it was a good lesson and she enjoyed it. A few pictures of our activity are below.
Adding weight to the flat bridge
Flat bridge destroyed
Arches still holding up to weight.
WRAP UP
In total we spent maybe two to two and a half hours in total for everything. It was a good shake up from the normal lessons and I think my NLS was glad to have a break. As I said, feel free to use any of this material or modify it for your lessons at home.
Happy teaching and building!
