Legos are great for developing spatial reasoning skills, great for building grand castles, boats, even Rapunzel’s hair (yes, my daughter has demonstrated multiple times, you can make “hair” out of legos). Legos are also great items to use for developing addition and subtraction skills. Here are some of the ways we used our legos this past Friday in our math hour.
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Here are a few of the ways we learn math with our colorful blocks:
Sort them. Gather all the pieces of a certain size and color. Make piles.
Make comparisons. Which pile is bigger than another? Sort the piles in descending order.
Make place holders with the legos. Example: 1423 = a tower with 1 white lego, 4 red ones, 2 blue and 3 yellow.
Get out your flash cards. Re-create the problem on the card with the lego cubes. Solve the math equation.
Build a structure, and have another person try to mimic or re-create the structure – identically.
Count by twos. How many “dots” do you have in your lego? Counting by twos is easy with legos!
Talk while hunting for your a particular piece with word problems – ex: If you have 2 red pieces, how many more will you need to complete your project?
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How have your kids explored and learned with legos? I’d love to hear about it! If you liked this lego post, you might also enjoy reading How to Make a Lego Table or our tutorial on How to Make Lego Costumes.
About Rachel
I LOVE doing math activities with LEGOs and have blogged about two of them: Count & Stamp with LEGOs and Under Construction (a Greater-Than Less-Than Game). You can find them here:
http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2011/09/count-and-stamp-with-legos.html
http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2011/08/under-construction-greater-than-less.html
I’d love for you to stop by!
I love how you’ve taken the legos and used them to teach math. Very nice visual learning activity.
I encourage my students to make a structure using x number of blocks. For the hundredth day of school we make a creation using 100 blocks. Build patterns using colors. Thanks for your suggestions, I just found your blog last week and I love your ideas.
Ami has some great Lego ideas and learning activities you can print for free!
http://www.walkingbytheway.com/blog/?p=715306
http://www.walkingbytheway.com/blog/?p=714508
http://www.walkingbytheway.com/blog/?p=714285
This is a wonderful way to make math hands-on and practical! Wish I’d have thought of it when my daughters were younger…although I suppose we could work Legos into multiplication, division, and decimals somehow!!
Legos are a fave in our household! Thanks for sharing yet another way to use them!
Found you on Skip to My Lou. Could you please share this with our readers for Fun Stuff Fridays? http://www.toysinthedryer.com/2012/01/fun-stuff-fridays-8.html
Great ideas for making math more fun. Thanks for the inspiration!