Home » Education & Career » Homeschooling on a Budget » Legos As An Educational Tool

Legos As An Educational Tool

© Teresa Higginbotham

So, you're walking along in a happy cheerful mood when all of a sudden a stabbing pain hits your foot. You look down on your living room floor to find a brightly colored lego left on the floor, just waiting to permanently hobble you for life. Now, before you take the tiny toy and chuck it up against the wall, stop and think about it--I can do more with this than embed it in my paneling--it's an educational adventure for my children! Uh, huh. It may take awhile to reach this point in the reasoning process, but it's true! You bought them for your kids as a toy, but Legos in their simplest form provide excellent skills in

Construction-build a house, castle, bridge, helipcopter, robot
Sorting-Learn colors, shapes
Math manipulatives-who needs teddy bear counters?
Patterning-Help your preschooler achieve reading readiness.

General Lego Lesson Plan Pages

Weird Richard

What a terrific page! He gives lesson plans that use Legos in art, engineering, building architectural models of the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, building gears and elements of mathmatics. This was the most comprehensive collection of lesson plans I found and each plan has a photograph of the lego project as well as direct instructions!
http://www.weirdrichard.com
Lessons & Ideas for K'nex, Legos, Lego Mindstorms, & Capsela
http://www.geocities.com/athens/8259/leg...

Edventures.Com

This site has a free trial of their product which is elaborate lesson plans teaching such things as architecture and space exploration using legos. They challenge the students to go as far as they can. They also have drawings going on continually to give away labs.
http://discover.edventures.com/frontend/...

Candy Factory Project
- Fifth grade at Davis Creek Elementary used Lego Dacta sets to make a candy factory
http://www.marshall.edu/lego/candyfactor...

Gerald Ford School Lego Lab
- Gerald Ford School Lego Lab, Palm Desert, California. Fifth-graders build and study machines using Dacta Robolab sets.
http://www.desertschools.net/lego/

Fractions
Grade 5
http://www.teachers.net/lessons/posts//8...

Gander's Academy Lego Dacta Activities:
Gears has eight experiments with lesson plans
http://www.stemnet.nf.ca/CITE/dacta.htm

Building a Structure With Legos: Oral Communication and Process Analysis
Grades 9-12
http://askeric.org/cgi- bin/printlessons.cgi/Virtual/Lessons/Language_Arts/Listening_Comprehension/LST0004.html
Lego Architecture Grades 6-12

Examine values and responsibilities in the field of science engineering. INTRODUCTION: Students will work as a team to look at construction analysis of building a house
http://home.talkcity.com/homepopup.html?...

Building a Structure With Legos
Students team up with a partner. They set up their work area so they are sitting back to back and cannot see each other's work space. Each partner gets a bag of lego pieces (both partners have the identical pieces). They take turns building a structure... 9-12
http://www.askeric.org/cgi-bin/printless...

Here are some more complicated lesson plans using Legos.

The copyright of the article Legos As An Educational Tool in Homeschooling on a Budget is owned by Teresa Higginbotham. Permission to republish Legos As An Educational Tool in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.