Sunday, August 9, 2009

Legos at the Library

I was catching up on my journal reading this week and the July issue of SLJ has an interesting article on page 24 called "Block Party" that caught my eye. I am always trying to think of ways to add some after school and evening events to the library but frequently feel that they need to fall into the literacy category. The author of this article, Abbe Kebanoff, describes a Lego club that her library started for kids ages 3 to 14. While this is a public library I thought that this might have real potential for the school library too.

She said that the program started out as a contest for one day that turned into a monthly meeting club for kids to come and build for two hours one Sunday a month. They incorporate reading into the beginning of the time and work on a monthly theme. They have tracked the circulation stats and have a real increase in youth checkout on the weekends when this program runs.

They justify the program by pointing to research that shows that tactile and kinesthetic learning increase student understanding. Play paves the way for learning in other areas by increasing attention span, memory, creativity and language and vocabulary skills. The Legos in particular lay the foundation for logical mathematical thinking, scientific reasoning and problem solving.

This is an idea I would be willing to try and implement at my library. I'm wondering if others have tried it or something similar in the public schools. If so, how did it go? How often did you do it? How did you pitch it to administration? I think I would want to focus on the 2nd through 5th graders at my school. The age range in the article is a bit to much for me. I think I might do once a trimester to start. Any thoughts?

2 comments:

  1. We have a yearly program in our public library--it is our single largest program of the year. We have multiple sessions and even the waitlist has a waitlist. I do think it could translate well to the school environment, too!

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  2. I wrote my grant on Legos! I think I was partly inspired by that same article. Also, when I taught computers (waaaaaay back when) I designed a unit on programming Lego Robotics. It was a blast! As a classroom teacher, I saw kids struggle with the ISAT math extended response - they had to solve a problem, explain how they solved it, and explain why they solved it that way. It seems to me that simple programming with Lego robots could help kids with that process. So far, this is all imaginary, so I can't give you any real feedback, however. Sorry!

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