Lego Words

I'm going to try not to put too many teacher-related posts on this blog. However, as teaching takes up the bulk of my life sometimes I just have to share things that I do! This quarter for graduate school, I am taking a class where I tutor in the university's learning center. I have two students that I tutor, one gives me no trouble and I actually enjoy working with her. The other, a second grade boy, is making my life very difficult! I don't do so well with young children and he has decided he hates me and will not work for me. He literally throws temper tantrums in the middle of the tutoring center, which is very embarrassing! All the little boy wants to do is draw or talk about legos. So, I started looking on the internet for ideas with Legos. I tweaked an idea I found online and tried it out for the first time on Tuesday. It worked! Okay, I suppose I can't say that yet, because I don't have long-term evidence that it actually will help him with spelling/reading...but for me, it worked.

I got a Lego set and labeled each lego with a letter. I used short legos for the "short letters" (a, c, e...) and taller legos for the "tall letters" (b, d, f...). I used masking tape and a sharpie to do this (I figured the sharpie would smear on the plastic Lego). Armed with my bag of Lego bags (but struggling with a nasty case of Laryngitis), I was cautiously optimistic when I went in for our tutoring. I had told him about the idea the previous week (when I was searching for some sort of bribe!), so he was expecting the Legos.

We did his other homework first, and then I placed the Legos in alphabetical order. He had 9 spelling words for the week. I showed him how to pick out the letters and snap them together to build a word. This activity helped him by having him practice identifying letters (he really struggles with naming isolated letters, so searching for the correct letter was a task in its own) and of course practicing the words. He would build a word (with the list in front of him), saying the letters aloud a few times, and then he would add the new word onto his creation. When he had built all nine words, I had him take apart the mass creation he built. This reinforced the words again, because he had to think about which "chunks" were his words. I had him really look at the shape of the legos (for instance, blue has two tall letters and then two short letters). We took apart all of the legos and then I had him do four words without the list. Guess what? He got all four words right!

He really enjoyed this activity and was very into the idea of "building words," just like he would build a robot or a house. I am definitely going to use this idea with my children as a tool to get them engaged in making words before they enter into school. I highly recommend this activity!