Learning with Legos: Sentence Building Activity

If you find yourself constantly stepping over red, blue, and yellow plastic bricks, then chances are you have a Lego fan living in your home.

The plastic bricks are not only fun to build with, but Legos are perfect for hands-on learning that your child will love.  In fact, you can use them for some fun sentence building activities at home and at school.  

Lego Sentence Building is a fun way to teach kids about sentence structure and the parts of speech.  

For more fun ways to teach parts of speech, check out our sticky notes parts of speech activity. 

When you mix a child’s interests with what they are learning, it’s a win-win situation for everybody.

Using blocks to teach sentence structure makes learning fun.  You may also like our printable silly sentence activity.

Lego Sentence Building

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For this Learning with Legos activity, you need:

• Legos  (I used the larger Duplo-sized Legos so I could write our words a bit larger.)
• Masking Tape
• Black Permanent Marker

Cut the masking tape to fit each block, and then use a marker to write one word per block.  

(I’ve also heard you can write directly on your blocks and clean the permanent marker off with hand sanitizer, but we weren’t ready to try that.)

You can color-code your words to help students quickly identify each different part of speech.  

For example: 

• Write all your nouns on yellow blocks.
• Write verbs on blue blocks.
• Use a marker to write the articles “a” and “the” on green.
• Write other adjectives (descriptive words) on red blocks. 

Choose nouns that your child will recognize and be excited to use.  

If you have an animal lover, you might use several types of animals (dog, monkey, horse).  You can also use names of family members.

For best results, choose verbs that can be immediately followed by a direct object (or another noun).  For instance, “hit,” and “saw” can be followed by a the direct object “ball” in the sentences:  “I hit the ball.”    “The dog saw the ball.”  

To make it easier for you to recreate this activity at home, here are the verbs we used:  hit, kissed, cooked, ate, threw, and sees.  

For older children you could use another color block for prepositions (on, under, over, behind…) and have your child make even longer sentences.    “The dog saw the ball under the bed.”  

(Teaching contraction words?  Check out this simple contractions activity.)

Sentence Building Activity

Once you have your blocks ready, it’s time to build sentences with Legos.

For younger children you may need to tell them which color block they need to use as they build their sentence.  

This is a great opportunity to introduce the different parts of speech.  

For example in the sentence pictured above I asked them to place the blocks in this order: green, yellow, blue, green, red, and yellow.  We paused to talk about how the yellow blocks were all nouns (person, place, thing, or idea) and the blue blocks were all action verbs.

For an older child you might challenge them to build a sentence without telling them which order the colors should go in.  Instead you could challenge them to find a noun or a verb as they create their sentence.

After a while you can take learning about sentence structure a step further.

 Once your child has created their sentence, have them write it out, making sure to use correct capitalization and end punctuation.

You can also use the Legos to help practice reading fluency.  

Build your own sentence using the blocks and ask your child to read it to you.  The sillier the sentence, the better!

This simple Lego learning activity not only teaches sentence structure but also introduces the parts of speech.  

If your house is littered with Legos, put those colorful bricks to good use with this Lego Sentence Building Activity.  

You may also like:

• Roll a Sentence Activity from This Reading Mama
• Subtraction Squish
• Hands-On Learning for Double Digit Math

Originally published January 16, 2015.