Tech Tuesday: Build a Story with LEGO

For many years, I had viewed my students’ interest in LEGO^® products as having some potential for instruction in social skills and language development. I mean, anything that spurs that much engagement from children can be leveraged for learning, right? However, I struggled around how to structure the use of actual LEGO blocks to create a situation where students were practicing language and social interaction together rather than just doing their own thing.

The solution came with a realization that LEGO can be used to have students build and interact around one scene or story, and the essential piece, literally and figuratively, is as simple as a baseplate.

A baseplate is a large, flat, usually square LEGO piece that functions as a ground, so to speak, for building a scene. As such, a baseplate is key to developing a setting, and when you set the expectation that students will build the same scene together, the baseplate serves to ground them, their interactions, and storytelling!

In the above image, you can see a creation I worked on with a small group. We set out to have a “Group Plan” (see the importance of this concept within the Social Thinking^® Methodology) of creating a winter scene. Over subsequent weeks, in 10-minute activities, we worked on playing together while reinforcing the elements of narrative with use of Story Grammar Marker^® in progressively more complex ways:

To start, we built the scene and focused on the Descriptive Sequence:

In another play session, we advanced to focus on actions and formed an Action Sequence:

Note that at this stage having some LEGO minifigures (people) becomes important to serve as Characters. LEGO blocks can be non-representational and used to form any shape, thereby working on “Sharing an Imagination” (another important concept in Social Thinking^®).

As we continued in subsequent sessions, this gave us opportunities to play and develop Reaction Sequences and more:

A side note: it can be difficult to get kids to transition from LEGO building—I have found it especially helpful to set expectations with the wonderful 360 Thinking Time Tracker app. The stages of Setup, Play and Cleanup can be aligned with the color-coded Get Ready, Do, and Done stages timed within the app.

For this post, we are thinking of LEGOs as a form of technology...it’s not always electronic! In our next Tech Tuesday blog we’ll look at some web and app resources related to LEGO as well. I realize that LEGO is EXPENSIVE. If you are looking to get started and have some items that can facilitate a lot of storytelling and cooperative play, I recommend items such as the following:

• LEGO Starter Set
• LEGO Baseplates
• LEGO Minifigures (sometimes generic is OK, particularly when it comes to Minifigures who spend a lot of time in action and don’t need to fit with other pieces)

Happy Building and Storytelling!