Plenty of hands-on ways to use LEGO to make learning in your Early Years classroom engaging and effective!
My children love any hands-on activities that include building particularly when it includes DUPLO and LEGO blocks.
Following their lead, we've been using LEGO to help learn different concepts like our letters and numbers, beginning sounds and how to spell. We've been using these in our literacy centers in class but you can just as easily use the ideas at home too.
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At the start of the school year most Early Years classrooms concentrated on learning all of our letters.
While learning the letters of the alphabet, it's also useful to start talking about the sounds they make in words. Start with just the beginning sound - a is for apple, b is for book...
Focusing on lower case letters - how some letters are tall, some are small and some fall below the line when we are writing. We started using our DUPLO blocks which are perfect for small hands to grasp and create with.
Creating a complete alphabet using our DUPLO blocks was as simple as writing on them with a black Sharpie.
During our Daily 5 word work, the children worked to put the letters together correctly using what we know about handwriting. Some students sang the Alphabet Song to help them work on the order of the letters while others used our desk mats to help them.
When introducing the upper case letters in class, the children tried to make the first letter in their names as one literacy centre activity.
I'd seen this idea in the new The Unofficial Guide to Learning with Lego: 100+ Inspiring Ideas book. It's a fantastic book with plenty of activities across the curriculum to try either at home or in the classroom. Suitable for ages from 3+ up to around 10 years it can be purchased through Amazon in print or Kindle or as an ebook via this link.
In another literacy centre, I placed both lower case and upper case letters on the side of individual Duplo blocks for the children to match. To make this task more independent, I had also matched the colour of the blocks for added support.
As my students have become more confident in identifying the capital letters, I recreated the same task but using the longer Duplo block for all the upper case letters and any tall lower case letters or letters that fall.
In the first rotation, students were asked just to match the upper and lower case letters but in the second rotation later in the term, they were asked to do the same and then work on putting them in alphabetical order as well.
We've also been using our LEGO to work on our spelling.
Simple short words that are easily decodable are the best place to start when learning to spell. CVC words or those that follow the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern are perfect for early learners.
These CVC LEGO Mats are perfect as the children can directly match the LEGO blocks to the printed word before attempting to write the word themselves.
We always seem to be practicing our sight words so adding some LEGO to this helps engage even the most reluctant speller.
I made two versions of these LEGO Sight Word - mats that the children can directly build the word on.
And smaller cards which are perfect for reading practice too but help build visual discrimination and spatial awareness skills to rebuild the word independently.
Another literacy idea I used from The Unofficial Guide to Learning with Lego: 100+ Inspiring Ideas book was one for practicing sight words. I used this one both in the classroom and at home with my youngest child who loves being able to practice her own word list different hands-on ways.
