Building Math Skills Brick by Brick

Algebraic thinking, numeracy, math sense -- these words are all foreign to me. I think I know what they mean -- in a vague sense -- but never really concerned myself with them too much.

Until lately.

I have found myself in demand as an advanced math resource person these days -- a position I never expected to have, with majors in journalism and history and a career of teaching those two subjects. Thankfully, those previous areas of study have given me major research skills -- which I've put to use in the past month looking for hands-on math activities.

I came across this fabulous post by Alycia Zimmerman on Scholastic.com, which sparked my interest in what can be taught with LEGOs. I tweaked her "part-part-whole" activity a bit with my first graders recently, who have been studying place value.

I pulled 1x10, 2x10, 1x1 and 1x2 bricks from my LEGO bins, as well as some plates and base plates. (If you just got lost on the LEGO terminology, check out this glossary post from thebrickblogger.com.)

Ready to start, I piled the LEGOs in the middle of the table, and handed the kids small whiteboards. First, they chose a random two- (or three-) digit number and wrote it on their whiteboards. Then, they got to build their number out of LEGOs. They used the 1x10 and 2x10 bricks for their tens place, and the smaller bricks for their ones place.

56 = 20+10+20+2+2+1+1

Wanting to expand their numeracy? skills (please correct me if that is not the correct use of that concept -- like I said earlier, I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole math terminology thing), I had them write out the equations they just built. For example: 56=20+10+20+2+2+1+1.

They loved it!

If you have any awesome ideas for using LEGOs in math, (or any awesome hands-on math ideas), please post them below -- I am always on the hunt for more.