In late January, I had the pleasure of speaking about preschool STEM to a dedicated group of educators with Weekdays Childcare. I love speaking to teachers, and during this presentation, I shared one of my favorite simple STEM activities, Lego Challenges. Today as I was prepping to share a photo of a Lego challenge on Instagram ( follow me there for more ideas), I thought about all the families and teachers at home looking for simple ideas using materials they already have. I decided to pop together a collection of easy Lego activities that parents can use to work on necessary skills at home. All five of these activities may not be a perfect match for your students or child, use what works for you! If you need more simple activities that use everyday materials, check out our weekly preschool plans.
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Simple Lego Activities For Early Childhood Education
Gather your materials. You can use any Lego bricks for these five activities but, you will need 2 of the exact same brick. For younger children use fewer bricks in total, and for older, make it harder by using more. For Toddlers, use Duplo!
Lego Brick Match
This activity is as easy as it gets. Simply challenge your child to find all the matches. Be sure to explain that many may be the same color or the same shape, but they need to match the bricks that are precisely the same in every way. As children do this, they are working on their visual discrimination skills, which is a technical way of saying that they can tell the difference between two shapes. This skill is important because it’s needed for things like letter and number recognition, sight words, and more.
Lego Size it Up
Challenge your child to make a tower, or two if you have many bricks, starting with the largest bricks and going by size up to the smallest. Not only are children learning about size differentiation, but they are also working on fine motor skills while they build.
Color Match & Count
Match up the bricks by color. How many bricks of each color do you have? Count them up and see. Color recognition and math, in a simple activity!
Engineering Challenge
This is my original Lego Challenge. The idea is that you create something with half the bricks and then your child (or student) recreates it. Please note you need to have two sets of exactly the same blocks. For younger children start very simply and show them how to do it.
Can you make this?
Halfway there.
Tada!
Free Build
This may seem like a no-brainer, but the difference between this and silly saying ” Go build with your Lego” is that giving a child a limited amount of Lego bricks can help make it less overwhelming. Sometimes a big bucket is just too daunting. I love seeing how creative children can be with such simple materials.
More Lego Learning Activities
What are your favorite simple lego activities? Here are some more ways to use Lego for learning.
This game is FANTASTIC – but you do need a few extra supplies like dice, a base plate, and a divided tray. See how to play here.
This is a fun math game for preschool and kindergarten.
[…] did some of the fun Lego activities from here and […]