Legos

My son loves to play with legos. I think they are his absolute favorite thing in the whole world. He has at least two or three lego parts in his hand at any given time during his waking hours. I think he even has legos in his bed.

I decided to take his love for legos and turn it in to a learning experience. I came across a blog about legos. They had turned it into a lapbook project. I have never done a lapbook before but I thought this sounded really cool. I was talking to a few other homeschooling moms about it and they decided that they would love to join in the fun. So we are meeting once a month to work on our lego lapbooks.

The first time we met we talked about Ole Kirk Christiansen the inventor or legos. We learned that he was from Denmark so we found a map of Europe and located Denmark on the map. We learned that the word lego actually comes from the Danish words “Leg Godt,” or “play well.” (Appropriately, “Lego” also means “I study,” or “I put together” in Latin). Did you know that the first legos were actually made out of wood? The project for the kids to complete that day was to make the flag of Denmark out of legos. We took pictures of their flags so they can include the pictures in their lapbooks.

The second time we met we talked about the lego company. We learned what a mission statement is and we learned how the lego bricks are made. We watched a couple of videos about the process of making lego bricks. The project for the day was to build a ship without any directions.

The third class was about how legos are designed and what you can design with legos. We talked about words such as “Interference Fit” and “Friction”. When you press the lego bricks together the studs press against the walls and tubes and push them open a bit. This is what makes the bricks lock together. The bricks are resilient so when you take them apart they go back to their original shape. The building challenge for this class was to make a mosaic.

The last class used several different learning activities. We learned how to use the bricks to help with multiplication. Some bricks have two studs across and three studs down. Two times three equals six. We also learned about graphs. The kids each got a cup full of legos. They sorted them by color. Then they made a graph to show how many bricks of each color they had.

I think everyone had a great time with the lego learning group. We are looking for another topic so we can do it again.