Sure, Guys, We Can Make a Robot Dinosaur Out of LEGOs...

   A few months ago, I was having lunch with my second graders (I do this with every GT group, every other week). 
   And I asked them, "What ideas do you have for our next project?"
   "Oooh! We should do dinosaurs!"
   "Robots!"
   "Learn to blow stuff up!"
   "Basketball -- we should learn about basketball!"
   "LEGOs! I love to make stuff with LEGOs!"
   I took a deep breath, preparing to settle them down a bit, when one of the boys (it's an all-boys group), piped up. "Guys, guys -- we can make this a win/win."
I sat back in my chair and listened as this 7-year-old negotiated a project that every single kid was on board with.
   "We can make a robot, out of LEGOs, in the shape of a dinosaur -- and it can throw a basketball!" he said. (You will notice that even the 7-year-old knew the blowing-stuff-up option was a no-go.)
   "Yeah!" "Yeah!"
   Then seven sets of big eyes turned to me. "Can we do that, Mrs. Zepeda?"
   And I was so impressed at the level of conversation, and their use of Covey's 7 Habits to listen and negotiate with each other, that I said,

   "Sure, guys, we can make a robot dinosaur out of LEGOs."

   Now, to figure out how...

Coding with Kids

I know I'm just the latest in a very long line of educators jumping on the coding bandwagon, but I'm hooked. Coding -- computer programming -- is being called a "New Literacy" for our kids to learn. It's also really fun.

This week, our First Lego League teams dived into building and programming their robots -- a little behind, I know, but we're rookies. Kids who have had no exposure to programming (and coaches who have had very little), are now expected to create robot that can make its way through a multitude of obstacles and perform a task. Overwhelming? Perhaps a bit (especially for the grownups). But the kids looked up some how-to videos, opened up the program, and dove right in.

Looking ahead, I'm realizing that my younger students really need experience with programming, so when they join FLL in a few years, they will be ready to go (also, it's good for that whole career/future/rest-of-their-life thing).

The upcoming Hour of Code is a great opportunity to kick off some coding projects, which I'll write about here as we do them. For more information -- and a plethora of amazing resources, check out Terri Eichholz's "Engage their Minds" blog or Cristina Popescu's "Think Appy Thoughts."

Facilitating Failure

This week, I posted about a cool LEGO math activity I did recently with my first graders. One of my kids -- a first-grader determined to learn square roots, as he believes himself to already be the master of lesser maths -- was not satisfied with a two- or three-digit number. Nope -- he wanted to go to five digits.

So, I let him. Did I know it would be nearly impossible to do in our limited time, with our limited number of LEGOs? Of course. And I didn't say yes because I wanted him to fail at his choice -- this wasn't a cheap opportunity to tell him "I told you so -- now, learn what I tell you."

Instead, I figured it would be a great "teaching moment" for him to really understand the idea of exponential growth behind place values.

First, he picked a number in the 50,000s. He quickly revised that downward to 10,000 -- still quite the feat to accomplish with LEGO studs.

We added. We skip-counted and multiplied (he is gifted at math). We never made it to five digits, but I think, using the available base plates, that we made it to around 2,000 studs before he had to go back to class.

Sure, he failed at his original task -- building a five-digit number. But he and the two girls with him all left with a great understanding of just how huge a number 10,000 is.

Sometimes we learn more by failing than succeeding -- an important lesson I try to teach my GT kids, and one I often need to remember myself.

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.