Lovin' Legos®!

I'm pretty sure one can never outgrow a fondness for Legos®.  I played with them ALL the time as a kid and had my own Lego® table that had an opening with a mesh bag attached to it in the center to store all my Legos®.  My husband and I spent last Christmas Eve watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation while assembling two big Lego® castle sets he had gotten for his birthday but had yet to set up.  I even have a Lego® Yoda on my keychain (I've never actually seen Star Wars, but my husband was giving out these keychains to some guy friends at our apartment one night and I guess I just didn't want to feel left out!)

Needless to say, I don't mind one bit when the preschoolers I'm seeing in class choose the Lego® center, or when they request it as one of their choices for therapy activities during pull-out sessions.  Here are 3 ways I like to use Legos® in therapy!

1.  Vocabulary Building:  I've used Legos® to target animal vocabulary (think Farm, Brown Bear Brown Bear, and Ocean themes).  Cut small pictures into twos or threes and tape onto the Legos®.  You can have kids match animal tops/bottoms (or throw 'middles' in there, too!) and then label the animals.  Identify their different features (ie fins, beaks, wings, etc...!) while you do this activity.  There was even one day where I was working on basic concepts with kids at center time using Legos® (see idea #2 below!) and taught them the word 'skyscraper' as we were making tall buildings.. it was really fun to hear them using that word on their own the next day when I came in!

2.  Basic Concepts:  I've done this a lot during center time with my preschoolers.  We work on building tall/short towers, long paths, putting certain colored blocks on top or underneath another block, etc...  You can easily do comparative concepts here, too.. which one is smaller, which one is tallest, which tower was made of more Legos®, etc...  Build a Lego® bridge and have toy animals/people go under and over it.  The animal vocabulary activity I mentioned above is perfect for working on concepts /top, middle, bottom/, too, by having them point to which part is the middle, which part is the bottom, etc..

3.  Associations & Categories:  Another simple way to use Legos® that is kind of similar to Idea #1.  Tape pictures of items that go together to various Legos®, and have your kids identify the items that belong together by matching up the correct Lego® pieces (this is easier with the larger Lego® blocks!).  To work on categories, stack Lego® pieces on top of each other that have pictures of items that all belong to the same category (animals, foods, etc...)

What are some of your favorite ways to use Legos® in therapy? Click below to check out the 3rd Thursday 3 For All Link Up, hosted by Speech2u, to see how other SLPs are using Legos® in therapy!