October was Master Builders’ time to shine! Legos are a favorite of many students and so is The Lego Movie. Therefor, it was relatively easy to come up with the plot for this activity. As always, a letter went home to the parents and an invitation was given to the students the day before, to build some excitement!
My family dug out our Lego sets and built President Business’s office and the Kragel machine. I had it on display in my room and, surprisingly, my students were fascinated with the display.
When I am busy creating content, I need to keep the other elements to a minimum, and this time it was the decor to be kept to a minimum. I ordered vests for my students from Amazon and I repurposed an old backdrop. I bought Lego pennants at the Dollar store, as well as mini construction cones. Every time a student got the right answer, I placed a cone on their desk. The mini cones read “Great Job”, “Awesome”, “Amazing Work”. The students were very proud to have the cones sit on their desks for a few minutes. I also found some construction/ PE cones in my husband’s old bins in the garage and decided to use them to mark the spots on the floor and keep the kids at a distance from each other.
For my younger ones, it was easy to come up with games and manipulatives. I have at least 100lb of Lego at home, so creating individual task boxes or buckets with small pieces was not difficult at all. {That’s how I solved the Covid NO SHARE rule!}
My students worked on many different levels to earn pieces for their buckets, so they can later compete in a Stem activity. They used all their pieces to build a tall structure in 1 minute. The student whose structure was the tallest and still standing at the end of the minute, won an extra piece for their bucket.
If your students come with work from gen ed or there is no wiggle room in your curriculum, you can still have them participate and make this activity fun for them. For every correct answer, they can get a piece for their bucket or their lego board., pieces that they can later use to decorate their glasses.
All students received Master Builder certificates and got to take home for a day a bag containing all their pieces collected throughout the day, as well as a pair of lego glasses. There was a letter for the parents with an activity called “What you don’t know about me”. Students had to use their pieces to create something that represented themselves. It also had to be something that others didn’t know about them. They got to wear the glasses in class the next day and present their creations! We all had a blast learning about each other and building relationships!
