Are you LEGO® Smart™? Are your students? Being LEGO Smart is more than building with LEGO® bricks. It’s having the ability to work in teams, solve problems, and create solutions. It means understanding key science, technology, engineering, and math concepts – not just on paper, but through demonstration. LEGO Smart students don’t just know it, they DO it. The sets, software, and curriculum designed by LEGO Education harness the power of the LEGO brick and combine to create learning opportunities for students that will help develop the skills needed for a lifetime of creating, solving, and contributing to a global society. Be LEGO Smart – be the future.
This activity can be completed with either home-made or store-bought alphabet flashcards. To begin each student is given an ample amount of bricks. When ready the teacher shuffles the flashcards and randomly selects one from the deck.
The teacher presents the card to the class and asks the class to make the sound that particular letter makes. Remember: vowels and some special consonants are capable of making more than one sound and students need to be reminded about these unique cases.
When the letter has been reviewed, the teacher instructs the students to build a model of an object which starts with that particular letter sound. When the students have finished building, the teacher should go around the room asking each student what they made, writing the name of each model on the board.
How long of a list were the students able to create? Can they think of more objects they could have built? Did the models built represent the various sounds that some letters can make? Did the students make any mistakes such as building a "cat" model when the letter "K" was drawn?
Remember that for younger students these kinds of mistakes are inevitable; if this does occur simply use it as a stepping stone into a discussion about why it is important to study letter sounds and words.