Teacher Tuesday: Learning with Legos

I have fun memories of Legos from my childhood.

My siblings and I would lay out every Fisher-Price Little People house, school and business we owned on the floor of the living room to form a neighborhood. After determining what our mini community was lacking - like roads, trees, a McDonalds, and a public swimming pool – we proceeded to dump out tens of thousands of multi-colored bricks, planks, gears and heads to finish our urban development.  Legos occupied us for days.

As a parent, my memories of Legos are somewhat less fond. Those blasted little pieces of interlocking plastic are expensive! Not to mention they clog toilets, break garbage disposals, fit up noses, hide in carpets, and can be easily launched across the room by frustrated little kids… and maybe their mom.

I recently learned of a new use for Legos, one that puts them solidly back on my “Like” list.

A few weeks ago, Scott and Jenny Nash visited campus to train our faculty and staff. One of the topics covered was the creative use of Legos in the classroom.

Miss Luchterhand teaches Visualizing and Verbalizing, a curriculum developed by Lindamood-Bell to enhance students’ ability to mentally visualize what they read and then answer higher order thinking questions.  She usually has the students draw pictures of a sentence to make sure they’re visualizing correctly, but after the Nash’s training, in the last unit Miss Luchterhand decided to have the students work with Legos instead.

In her words, “It was fabulous!”

The students loved the experience, and Miss Luchterhand enjoyed seeing how creative each one could be using the same material.

Here is the pictorial debut of Black Death, visualized and verbalized by Alex and Brandyn:

 


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