Count those bricks - LEGO Math
Looking for creative, hands-on ways to practice math concepts? These LEGO math activities are perfect for teaching the early learners and helping older learners build on their math foundations.
Starting with the basic building blocks of early math, sorting and patterns, it's as simple as getting a handful of bricks and asking your child to sort them into piles by size, shape and/or colour and asking them about what makes each group of bricks the same/different.
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It's then an easy step from there to practising patterns. Whether you build part of the pattern and ask your child to complete it or create pattern cards for your child to follow these early concepts teach the basis for more complicated math.
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From there LEGO bricks become a great visual and kinesthic tool to teach addition and subtraction, multiplication and division.
Start slowly by asking your child to count the number of bricks. You can make the sum even more visual by adding pen and paper to put the plus, minus and equal signs between the bricks. Once they've got the hang of counting in ones, bricks can be built into towers to practice skip counting in 2s, 3s and more.
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Or to learn the difference between the units 10s and 1s, how to count with them and place order within numbers. If you're brave you can extend it to hundreds, though your brick tower may be huge!
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These same types of towers and patterns we did earlier can then also form the basis for discussions about symmetry. Simply make the patterns more complicated as your child gets older.
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Towers also form the basis of graphing and charting and can be used as part of teaching and recording probability. Start off simple with basic line and picture graphs. And bigger bricks! Choose simple things for your child to record on paper and then make a simple visual graph representation.
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Moving to older children, you can up the ante by adding them to graph other concepts such as probability. In this idea by frugalfunforboys a selection of lego bricks were put in a bag and pulled out at random and graphed to show the probability of selection.
You can graph by colours, shapes, types of toys, household items you've collected. The only limit is your imagination and their concentration.
As LEGO bricks come in such a myriad of colours and sizes they are also great for teaching fractions and how they form part of a whole. Show your child an 8 dot brick, then help them use other bricks, 4 dot bricks, 2 dot bricks and so on to learn how they can build the whole from these different parts and how much of the whole each smaller brick represents.
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Once they grasp this the bricks can be used to create simple equations for children to solve.
LEGO bricks can be used to teach almost all the foundation math concepts in a fun, interactive way and make what can seem big, scary concepts into a fun activity. What will your child learn through play today?
