If your kids love Legos, and you are looking for some fun new games for kids, then I have just the trick for you.  

Turn those colorful blocks into a new game with some of these DIY Lego Games for kids. 

Affiliate links have been provided below; see my full disclosure for more information. 

Building with blocks is a fun way for kids to work on problem solving as well as fine motor skills.  

You can use those bricks to make learning more fun, too, like we did with our Lego Sentences activity.  

The games below give a new twist to everyone’s favorite blocks. 

DIY Lego Games

DIY Lego Board Game —  Create your very own colorful Lego game to play with the kids.  Kids will have fun collecting bricks as their mini figures make their way through the spaces.  

Lego Charades —  Looking for a new game for family game night?  Use those bricks you already have to play this fun version of charades. 

Hexbug Lego Maze —  Hexbugs are so fun to play with! Challenge your child to engineer a colorful maze for it out of those bricks.  This low-prep STEM activity will keep them busy for hours. 

Lego Challenge Card Game —   Grab your bricks and a timer and get ready to play this printable brick building challenges game.  

Lego Checkers —  Want to teach your kids the classic game of checkers?   Build your very own board and make it even more fun.  

Lego Tic-Tac-Toe —  Make that tic-tac-toe game more fun with this colorful twist.  

Lego Marble Maze —  Start with a simple maze, for your child to try.  Then have your child design one with more twists and turns.  

Duplo Geoboard —  Discover how to turn that base plate into a DIY geoboard. 

Pom-Pom Maze —  Can your child blow the pom-pom through the maze?   Take turns making maze to challenge each other.  

Lego Party Games —  Thinking of a Lego themed party in the future?  These party games for kids using Legos would be perfect! 

Looking for even more ways to play with those bricks?  

Lego Board Games

Minotaurus —  This is one of our favorites!   Step into mythology and meet the mighty Minotaur, who protects a secret temple hidden deep inside a labyrinth.  Be the first to lead your heroes to the temple, avoiding the Minotaur and cleverly placing walls to block your opponents. 

Harry Potter Hogwarts Game — Another of our favorites, and so much fun for Harry Potter fans!  Build your own mini Hogwarts, complete with moving staircases.   Collect your school items before your opponents.  

Lego Pirate Code Game —  Who is the most sneaky pirate of them all?   Can you guess the other players’ secret codes before they discover yours?  Kids will have fun with this game of logic and luck. 

Ludo Game —   Build your own version of this classic game, including 16 mini-figure players and a colorful play area with 4 team bases.  Plus, there’s a  a buildable number spinner. 

Magma Monster — Be the first to build a path over the molten lava.  Then battle the monster and take the ancient golden treasure as your own in this fun game.

Banana Balance — Picking the best bananas is tricky work.   Try to collect the most fruit, without tipping the tree over.  This cute balancing game has plenty of fun monkeying around.  

Lego Race — A fun and simple car racing game for 2-4 players. 

These DIY Lego games are a fun way to play with those bricks and are sure to inspire your kids to create their own games in the future.  

You may also enjoy:

• DIY Shark Games
• Catapulting Peeps Game
• Make a Marble Roller Coaster

The post Fun DIY Lego Games Kids Love first appeared on There's Just One Mommy.

Legos are perfect for inspiring kids’ imaginations.   They are also perfect for a variety of STEM activities for kids.

One of our favorite activities with the bricks has been this Hexbug Lego Maze STEM Activity. 

The mix of STEM and feel of a game is a fun combination kids will enjoy over and over. 

Affiliate links have been used in the post below.  For more details, see my full disclosure.

Mixing learning with blocks, like we did with our DIY Lego board game, is always fun.  

If your kids enjoy this activity, they may also have fun building their own cardboard tube marble maze.  It’s just one of the fun activities you’ll find in my book, Awesome Engineering Activities for Kids.  

Hexbug Lego Maze STEM Activity 

Materials Needed:

• Hexbug Nano
• Lego Base Plate
• Collection of Assorted Lego Bricks

Set up for this Lego STEM challenge is super simple.   Start with an empty base plate, a tub of Legos, and your Hexbug.  

Challenge your child to build a path for the Hexbug to travel.

Younger kids may want to start with something simple at first.  

Encourage your child to test out the maze as they go.  This will allow them to fix any issues before they get too far.  

Why Build a Lego Hexbug Maze

STEM activities are a fun way for kids to be creative while experimenting with their own ideas.  They can help foster team-working skills as well as problem solving skills. 

As your child builds their Hexbug maze, they will encounter plenty of problem solving opportunities.  

• Are the walls high enough so the Hexbug doesn’t climb over them?  
• Are there gaps in the walls?  If so, the Hexbug could get stuck.  
• Are the paths wide enough?  Or, are they too wide?  We discovered that paths that were 3 dots wide worked the best for keeping the Hexbug going forward.  
• Did they have enough room to make the necessary turns?   You need enough room to make the turn, but still not so much room that the Hexbug may turn around and go the wrong way.  

Once your child figures out the best design plan, they can add to the maze.  

They may choose to make the maze longer or add a few extra turns to make it more complicated.  

Your child might even decide to add a few fun pieces just for decoration.   Let them get as creative as they want!  

My son added an open window at the end of the path for the Hexbug to go through. 

He also added a few fun pieces, like a spider web and some palm tree leaves.  

One thing your child will notice as they build their winding path is that the bumpy surface of the Lego base plate slows Hexbugs down quite a bit. 

Once your child creates a couple mazes that are successful, you may want to challenge them to build a Hexbug Lego habitat without using a base plate.  This will give them a whole new set of problem solving opportunities as the Hexbug travels faster through the labyrinth.  

It will also allow your child to make the maze larger than the size of the base plate. 

This simple Hexbug Lego Maze STEM Activity is the perfect boredom buster if the weather has your child stuck indoors.  

You may also enjoy:

• Must Have STEM Supplies for Home
• Build a Shelter Challenge 
• Why Kids Should Take Apart Electronics
• 30+ Educational Activities for Kids That Love to Build

The post Build a Colorful Hexbug Lego Maze! first appeared on There's Just One Mommy.

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

Affiliate links are used below.  Read the full disclosure here.

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.

The post Learning with Legos: Sentence Building Activity first appeared on There's Just One Mommy.

At the end of the year it is always fun to look back and see which posts were the biggest favorites.  This year learning activities were a HUGE hit here on the blog.  In case you missed them the first time, here are the top 5 kids activities from 2015.  

The top post on There’s Just One Mommy this year was Subtraction Squish.  This post was a big hit in terms of visits to the blog and people pinning it.    Kids learn best when having fun, and this one makes math fun! 

Our Lego Sentence Building Activity came in a very close second in terms of visits to the blog.  Everyone loves Legos, and they make such great learning tools.  If you have a child in early elementary school, be sure to check out this post.

This year we did a unit on weather.  Our third most popular post was a fun experiment we did during that unit:  Make a Cloud in a Jar.  This is a simple experiment you can do with the kids right now.

Who doesn’t love duct tape?  Over the summer we had fun with several duct tape crafts, including a Duct Tape Sit-Upon, which turned out to be our most popular craft.  Sit-upons are great for camping or sporting events, and this one is super easy to make.

Finally, with the new Jurrasic Park movie out this year, this round-up post full of Dinosaur Crafts and Activities was a favorite.  If you have a budding paleontologist on your hands you’ll want to check this one out.

Those were the top 5 posts written in 2015.  But, the most visited post of the year (for the 4th year in a row) was actually this Cat in the Hat Craft.   Who knew such a simple craft would become so popular?

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This year I plan on sharing many more fun learning activities and kids crafts.  Be sure to sign up for our twice monthly newsletter so you don’t miss any of the fun!

Want to see ALL of the Best Parenting, Education, and Craft Posts of 2015 from the top parenting bloggers on the web?   Check out the Pinterest board below.

You can also surf the top posts by category through the 3 linkies below!
CRAFT POSTS:

EDUCATION POSTS:

PARENTING POSTS:

The post Don’t Miss These Top Kids Activities of 2015! first appeared on There's Just One Mommy.

They are so popular, in fact, that you can find numerous activities using them in school settings.  We even made a unit for our homeschool year based on the colorful bricks.

One of our activities during school this week was creating this fun DIY Lego Board game.  It’s just one of the many DIY Lego games you can make with your kids. 

When it comes to playing, games for kids are a fun way for kids to learn while having fun.  

We have been having lots of fun learning with Legos lately.  We loved using them for our Lego sentences activity.

DIY Lego Board Game

To make our game board, we used a large square of cardboard from the recycling box.

I covered the cardboard with a large piece of white paper, and then we started to design our game board.

The kids decided to color the rectangles on our board with bright colors you would find in Legos.

Once it was colored, I added directions to the rectangles.

One of the goals of the game was to practice reading skills, so I made sure to make the directions fairly simple for my beginning readers.   I included color words, like “Pick up 1 blue” and other simple directions, like “Put back 1 block.”

To play our Lego board game, the kids rolled a game die, moved their Lego character, and followed the directions on the rectangle landed on.

At the end of the game they had fun creating with the pieces they had picked up.

Extensions: 

Older kids could design a more complicated board, including more specific directions of which pieces to pick up.

Or, play with a bunch of 2×2 square bricks and see who can build the tallest tower at the end to determine a winner!

(This post is not endorsed by the Lego company, it was merely inspired by its awesome interlocking blocks.)

Do your kids like to build?

• Building with Styrofoam
• Build a Boat That Floats
• 30+ Inspiring Projects to Inspired Your Child’s Construction Play

The post DIY Lego Board Game first appeared on There's Just One Mommy.