LEGO & Education: Create your own book

Legos, we are a lego obsessed family right now, might as well use that “love” to our benefit.   We have begun incorporating legos into our education.   In addition to the Lego lapbook we made last week, I wanted to incorporate creative writing & so I challenged my son to come up with a story about LEGO MiniFigures.   We started with a graphic organizer to help create a cohesive story.   This story map was the format my son preferred, but look through the graphic organizers and see what works best for your child.   After we organized his ideas, he dictated a very clever story to me.   If your child is ready to write their own story, go for it!   If your child needs to tell you their story, serve as their scribe as they weave their tale.

We reviewed the plot together and made any necessary changes.

We could have just put his story into our lapbook, but I am a huge fan of Shutterfly books, so I decided to turn his story into a project!

First, my son created his characters with LEGOs.   We set them in a bowl so they didn’t get disturbed, and then he worked on his scenery pieces.

On a sunny day, we went outside and he helped me place his characters in ways that corresponded with his story.   We had such a good time figuring out how to pose our LEGO MiniFigures for different parts of the story.   I didn’t have any “necessary” pictures in mind…I just followed my son’s lead and photographed whatever he asked me to.   He had fun taking some photos too & we were excited to move to the next step.

I later worked on putting his story into the online book template, but if your child is older they can easily do this themselves.   After I had the entire story entered, we worked together to decide which pictures to put on each page.

I was surprised my son had such firm ideas about which pictures should go on which page!   Since I wasn’t taking pictures for specific pages, it was easy to fill our book because we had a nice, large folder of photos to choose from.

The last things we worked on were the Dedication Page & About The Author page.   We went to the book shelf & pulled out various chapter books.   Seeing examples of dedications was helpful since it’s not a part of the book we usually read.   I was tickled pink when my son dedicated his book to his dad, and his About The Author page turned out really cute:

I love that this unit could be used for many ages, and LEGOs are always fun!     Here’s some other ideas of LEGO-tastic fun to include in your unit…

This homemade LEGO game is sure to bring giggles

Make a homemade LEGO Instruction Book for even your youngest builders.   Challenge older children to make a book for their younger sibling.

Incorporate some of these other fun LEGO Math ideas

What are you going to do with all those LEGOs when they’re not being used?   Make your own LEGO table, of course!