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.  Lego blocks are not only fun to build with, but they are perfect for hands-on learning that your child will love.  This learning with Legos: sentence building activity is perfect for teaching children about sentence structure.  (If you have kids that love to build, be sure to check out our ebook Up!)

When you mix a child’s interests with what they are learning, it’s a win-win situation for everybody.   Using Lego blocks to teach sentence structure makes it much more fun than just doing boring worksheets.

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 start introducing the parts of speech as well.  I used yellow blocks to write all our nouns.  I wrote verbs on the blue Legos.  The words “a” and “the” (articles) were written on green, and descriptive words (adjectives) were written 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.

Make sure the verbs you use can be immediately followed by a one word direct object.  (For instance, “sit” didn’t work without a preposition like “on” being used in the sentence, so that got tossed out.)  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.   Alternatively, you could use another color block for prepositions (on, under, over, behind…)

Lego 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 sentence building 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 learning with Legos activity. 

You may also like:

• DIY Lego Board Game
• Subtraction Squish
• Nerf Gun Math (So much fun!)
• 15 Learning Activities with Plastic Eggs