Classroom Ideas
Everyone knows of LEGO as the ultimate childhood building blocks, a cleanup nightmare for teachers after playtime, and the reason you never enter a child’s bedroom in the dark barefoot. From boats to helicopters, castles, cars, and planes, LEGO bricks are one of the favorite parts of every kid’s toy box. So what better tool to use for teaching difficult (and sometimes boring) math lessons than these!
Alycia Zimmerman, a teacher in New York, uses LEGO bricks to explain various math concepts to her 3rd-grade class, and the results are positive!
“In the classroom, the tiny bricks are now my favorite possibility-packed math manipulative,” according to an article Zimmerman wrote for Scholastic.
Check out the article for more detailed information about her strategies and for free downloads of various worksheets for using LEGO bricks to teach mathematics.
“As a third grade teacher, I’ve spent hours and hours drawing arrays, modeling how to skip count with arrays, deconstructing arrays, and building arrays with a myriad of tiny things.” – Zimmerman
She uses the tiny Lego bricks to teach fractions, multiplication, division, and even square numbers!
(h/t: designyoutrust)
Have you tried this in your classroom, or used Lego bricks in another educative way? If so, tell us! If not, let us know what you think about this!
