Building Blocks (6-8)

Giving children the chance to use their imaginations is important and giving them legos or wooden blocks to play with is a good way to do this. This building for fun also introduces engineering design principles like concepts on sturdy and non-standard structures. Blocks and legos can help develop children’s visuospatial and fine motor skills.

If you want to make playing with legos more mathematical there are a few ways to do it.

• Show children that the number of pegs on smaller legos totals the number of pegs on larger legos. You can even write the equation parts on the legos (see figure 1).

• Use the legos to represent or introduce fractions. Start with one long lego block as a base and stack up, it may be helpful to label these pieces (see figure 2).

Figure 1

Figure 2