Mention Legos and Things Get Done

Everyone was back in the full swing of school this week although occasionally there were groans of “I don’t really want to do that.” Not because a certain someone couldn’t do what was being asked, but rather was just being a stinker.

A few weeks ago I met a few ladies from Lego Education, had fun playing with some of their homeschool kits and knew that they would be something wonderful for the boys to use. The kits focus on gears, levers, pulleys, and eventually robotics. So…we bought two homeschool kits to use.

On Wednesday, a box arrived on our doorstep that quickly changed the behavior of two boys in the house. A big box full of Lego learning.

Being a mom who knew when to get as much out of a certain little six-year-old as possible, the two of us managed to get a LOT accomplished with the golden carrot of Lego time dangling. {grins – you know you would do it too!}.

Kaleb is making great progress with All About Reading and realizing that he CAN read {not that is he being made to read}. This week we worked on final blends in words and there were cheers from all the kids when he was reading words that had five letters in them with NO problem at all – because those blends finally kicked in!! Woot!

Now, Legos and reading weren’t all that we did this week {we also worked on math, language, science, Bible, art, and history}, but they were probably the most memorable.

Learning with Legos

After finding numerous vehicles, planes, people, and what-not had invaded our space and were occupying the time of some kiddos, we now have a ‘no Lego law’ in place. The Simple Machine Legos are officially the only ones allowed in the school room {cough}.

While Kaleb was ready to pull all the manuals out and build everything in site, we are going s.l.o.w.l.y through them and focusing on the different concepts being covered. This week we started with gears and levers.

You can see in the picture above that Kaleb was turning the handle to move the gears and we talked about what types of things we see gears in and what happens when there are gears of different sizes.

The yellow bricks and pieces were key in this lesson because they showed areas that you would put force, etc.. on in order for it to work. There was an area of yellow under his one hand as well, since he had to hold it there.

We also used two gears of the same size and compared the distance that the gear had to move to cover an equal amount of distance. Overall, this has been GREAT fun and there are some really fun activities coming up that I’m sure I’ll be sharing with you!

That’s the sum of our week – next week we’re having some Angry Birds fun and cannot WAIT for that either. How was YOUR week?

p.s. you might recognize some of the pictures from my Instagram stream. During the week I share different snippets of our day. Feel free to follow along here: http://instagram.com/jolanthed/

A Few Preschool Links 

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Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

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Maestro Classics ~ introduce great music and classics stories to children with this classical music series. Check out their FREE homeschool music curriculum guides!