LEGO has revealed its seven most popular toys this Christmas. The toy manufacturer's play sets are sure to be high on your little ones wish lists with a range of designs available. There are plenty of new attractions for this year, such as Heartlake City's Amusement Park and a Volcano Base among the list of winners. Some of your child's most loved characters are available in LEGO form including Batman, Scooby-Doo and even creatures from Jurassic World . The Star Wars Rogue One Rebel U-Wing fighter was also included in Dream Toys top 12 toys for Christmas this year. LEGO seems to be a star attraction in Liverpool, with a giant-train made up of 500,000 individual LEGO bricks and is stationed on Paradise Street, Liverpool ONE. Referring to the newly released list as their 'Magnificent 7', these are the sets which will no doubt be opened by thousands of kids on Christmas Day. This Roller Coaster play set will ensure your little one has as just as much fun as they would have in a real Amusement Park.
The set includes a Ferris wheel and a drop towers- just like a real fun fair. There is, of course a giant roller coaster which dominates the toy. Although this is one of the more expensive play sets, your little one is guranteed to love playing with this one. You can buy this direct from LEGO's website. This set will allow your little one to build a variety of rockets. This also acts as a great way of introducing them to buildings, as it comes with chunky bricks rather than LEGO's traditional smaller pieces. Some bricks are even decorated with colourful images of the planets, the moon and stars. The set also comes with corresponding number bricks which will help your child develop early counting skills. You can buy this rocket set here. If your little one is a fan of Science then this could be the perfect play set for them. It features a volcano which comes with an eruption function and gives budding scientists the opportunity to discover the secrets of the lava. The set comes with boulders and includes six minifigures;
a female scientist, scientist with heatsuit, female worker, male worker and two adventurers. You can buy this direct from the LEGO website. Featuring Jestro's Volcano Lair, Macy's Mace Slammer and Axl's Hover Horse, this set also comes with ten minifigures. Players will be able to get carried away as they send knights to steal the spell books from Jestro's Volcano Lair. The Lair itself has features including a detachable throne, a seated disc-shooter weapon and a trapdoor function. You can buy this from the website here. This set includes seven minifigures and the four-vehicles-in-one Ultra Stealth Raider and Chenosaurus. The Raider itself features two opening cockpits plus two open cockpits along with many other life-like pieces. This play set will allows users to recreate scenes from the Ninjago- Masters of Spinjitzu TV show. It is designed for ages 9-14. You can buy it here. This play set has been designed for older children as it is aimed at those aged 8-14. LEGO have also described it as the perfect addition to any existing Star Wars collection.
The three minifigures which are included are Poe Dameron, Lor San Tekka and a First Order Flametrooper, plus a BB-8 Astromech Droid. The set, which will allow users to recreate exciting planet-side scenes from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This comes with five minifigures and also Doc Ock's Octo-Bot and a police speedboat. The Octo-Bot features dual six-shooting rapid shooters too. It has been designed for ages 7-14 and even comes with a comic book. The idea is for players to fend of Vulture with Spider-man's web element, then free White Tiger so she can go against Doc Ock and help Spider Man defeat the villians. You can order this here. 15 things to do in Christmas week Get your snow fix without a white xmas Christmas shows and pantos in Liverpool 30 amazing Christmas family events When to take down your tree Look inside Dreamworks Lights City's new ice rink has a great viewGetting started with Lego as an adult February 21, 2014 Subscribe A recent gift has made me very interested in Lego but I don't feel like I know what to do with it unless I follow instructions.
How can I learn to do better stuff with Lego on my own?Resources for Teaching with LEGO® Bricks These days the web is filled with Free LEGO Learning Printables, even here at Great Peace Academy, you can download for free, counting and multiplication worksheets using LEGO bricks. Disclosure: Please note that this post has affiliate links to products which you may purchase from external websites. If you do, I may receive a small commission for the link that I’ve shared. Most children love LEGO bricks and playing with them can also be a learning experience. But did you know you can take it one step further and structure learning around LEGO bricks? Yep, LEGO bricks can be used for a wide variety of subjects, from science and math to language arts and writing. I’ve pulled together some of the best FREE LEGO Learning Printables on the web {Tweet That} so you’ll have a ready resource available here on the GPA Learning with LEGO page. That brings us to 106 Free Printable LEGO Learning Downloads.
Did I miss any? If you know of a printable or 2 that I haven’t included please share the title and link in comments. Be sure to take a look at LEGO Learning to find even more learning ideas. Ok it’s time to grab some LEGO Bricks, sit down with your children and let the learning begin. This post is a part of the iHomeschool Network 100 Things Link Up. This post is part of at iHomeschool Network. Stay up-to-date Subscribe to Great Peace Academy LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site.I was not one of those LEGO® kids growing up. Sure, my brothers had LEGO bricks, and every so often I’d kidnap some tiny LEGO men for a make-believe game. But I didn’t truly appreciate the engineering capacity of those studded plastic bricks. They were just so rigidly rectangular! As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate LEGO, both for its rectilinear aesthetic, and even more so, for its mathematical might.
In the classroom, the tiny bricks are now my favorite possibility-packed math manipulative! Read on for a sampling of math activities that use LEGO pieces to build and reinforce key math concepts. Chances are that if you are a parent or teacher, you already know, at least in theory, that these sturdy plastic blocks have huge intrinsic educational value. Along with the obvious creative implications, while children play with LEGO blocks, they are also building their spatial and proportional awareness. Advanced LEGO kits are even used on the high school and college level for computer programming, robotics, and more. Let’s face it though – many elementary school teachers are women who, like me, did not grow up as LEGO experts. And until you’ve had some firsthand experience playing around with the blocks, you may not be comfortable using it as a teaching tool. So, here is my plea: Find some LEGO bricks in a storage closet or basement, and take some time exploring how they work.
Count the studs, explore the dimensions, build some towers. And I guarantee, you’ll now be thinking … You'll undoubtedly find mathematical inspiration in a pile of LEGO bricks. For younger mathematicians, composing and decomposing numbers is a key component of building the number sense needed for arithmetic operations. Students begin with small landmark numbers such as five (one hand) or six (a standard die,) and build towards the all-important ten. LEGO bricks are awesome for part-part-total explorations! As with other popular part-part-total math manipulatives such as dominoes or dice, these bricks have clearly marked chits (on LEGO we call them studs) for students to count. The studs are often grouped in twos, which facilitate counting by twos rather than counting the studs individually. With practice, students will recognize arrangements of studs, and will not need to count them at all (subitizing). Students can group combinations of two or more LEGO bricks and find the total number of studs, or students can start with a larger brick, cover part of it with a smaller brick, and figure out the amount of remaining uncovered studs.
Download the LEGO Part-Part-Total Six and Ten Frame template. Download the LEGO Part-Part-Total Diagram template. As a third grade teacher, I’ve spent hours and hours drawing arrays, modeling how to skip count with arrays, deconstructing arrays, and building arrays with a myriad of tiny things. (Raisins, pennies, grains of rice …) After all, internalizing why and how arrays work is a cornerstone of building multiplicative thinking among my budding mathematicians. (For more ideas about building multiplication concepts, see my blog post Total Recall: Helping Our Students Memorize Multiplication Facts.) Having a collection of LEGO pieces on hand during multiplication lessons is so useful. I whip a few out to reinforce the area model, to demonstrate square numbers, and to remind my students about the commutative property of multiplication. Here’s a photo tour of some of the possibilities for using Lego to teach multiplication, and of course, its twin sibling, division.
Students can combine LEGO bricks to make a wide range of arrays. Exploring the factors of 48 using the area model and Lego bricks. Download my Multiplication and Division Exploration with LEGO for students to complete independently or with a partner. Fractions always seem to trip up my students. Things get murky when we’re talking about different size “wholes” or when we switch from thinking about the fractions of one whole to fractions of a set. The only way to combat fraction-mayhem is to provide students with a LOT of opportunities to experience fractions with tangible objects. Pattern blocks are a popular fraction manipulative, but I like LEGO even more. (Pattern blocks can only be broken down into sixths when using the hexagon as one-whole. LEGO blocks have many more possibilities!) With guided inquiry packets, students can work independently on exploring new math concepts. Download my Equivalent Fractions Exploration with LEGO activity. When analyzing data, upper elementary students explore various ways to express the “central tendency” of their data set;
that is, various ways to express the average. When finding the mean (arithmetic average), students quickly learn to add all of the data and then divide the total by the number of data points. But very few students fully understand why they do this add-then-divide dance to find the mean. While evening out LEGO towers of varying heights, students have a first-hand experience of what “mean” means. Students "add" and then "evenly divide" four LEGO towers to discover the mean value. Download my Mean, Median, Mode, and Range LEGO Activity. Let’s be honest, the first time you put out a bunch of LEGO pieces during a math lesson, the students are going to be itching to build towers, stage battles, and trade bricks. Don’t fight the tide – embrace it, for a bit. Give your students a predetermined amount of time to “explore the mathematical possibilities of their bricks.” Really, this is just a fancy way of permitting the students to play around, but it will go much smoother later on if you get this sanctioned playtime out of the way.
(For more ideas about managing the use of math manipulatives, check out Meghan Everette’s fabulous blog post Math Manipulatives: Learning to Control the Chaos.) When preparing for a LEGO lesson, I rarely give students access to the full range of LEGO pieces. Ahead of time, I prepare Ziploc bags with a careful selection of the pieces I know my students will need to complete the assignment. I also make sure my students understand how to return their bags of bricks. Bags are to be sealed and bricks are separated, unless they received a bag of “towers.” I often use LEGO-math as a math center activity, and the students are remarkably independent when they are provided with clearly labeled bags of specific bricks. What are your favorite math manipulatives? Do you use LEGO in the classroom? Share your suggestions, questions, and comments in the Comments section below! For updates about my blog posts and math resources I add to my class website, follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook.