Fun with Legos

Writing?! Five sentences?! THREE PARAGRAPHS?!?! That’s the reaction you get when you want the third graders to write (well for most of them). Forget about telling them to add more details or rewrite a sentence or, horrors of horrors, calling their finished work a draft!

Last week, as a fun idea, I brought Legos into the classroom to illustrate the writing process. The students were randomly put into five teams. Each team was given the same number of Lego bricks (15-2×4’s, 9-2×2’s, 8-1×4’s, and 2-1×8’s). They had 5 minutes to create something out of them. Teamwork was crucial too. As a matter of fact, one team couldn’t pull themselves together and had nothing to show when the time was up. Thus only four teams presented their creations and we voted for the best one.

Then the teams were given unlimited amount of Lego pieces, which included people, windows, doors, flowers, trees, wheels and more. Again they were given 5 minutes to come up with an award winning creation. This time the dysfunctional team pulled themselves together and created something. Each team presented their creation and they told why the second one is superior to the first. The students used terms like better, awesome, hotter, more details, clever, cooler details, bigger, and has an environment. The last one I wasn’t sure of at first, but after questioning the team, I suddenly realized they meant setting!!

Afterward we spent a few minutes relating their Lego creations to writing. How, when we use a limited vocabulary, our writing is boring, which was the exact word they used in describing their first creations. In order to make our writing better, cooler, hotter, we have to include details, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases and, of course, a setting. Sometimes we have writer’s block, like the team that couldn’t work together, but we should not let that deter us from writing. We need to push forward and do it. The next day, a student brought in his war cycle from home that he had built with Legos. He told me that he had to make six drafts (that was his exact word) before he settled on this final design. I loved it and told him to write down the drafting process to create this war cycle.

In the upcoming days, the third graders will be collecting Lego Blocks of Words. For now, there will be two strips of paper on the classroom wall – one titled Lego Blocks – Grownups and another Lego Blocks – Children. Underneath you will find all kinds of adjectives for that category. If you have a Lego block for these categories, let us know. We will add them to our collection. You never know, your block might appear in one of the student’s writing.

Mrs. Work

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Topics: 3 Third grade
Date: Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 4:01 pm