As an adult, I began to appreciate Lego, not only because of its linear aesthetic standards, but also because of its possible mathematical concepts. In the classroom, these cubes are now my favorite gadgets packaged with mathematical concepts. I will use the following examples to illustrate how to use Lego toys to establish key mathematical concepts.
Lego is not just for fun.
If you are a parent or a teacher, you should already know that, at least in theory, these durable plastic blocks have great potential educational value. In addition to obvious creativity, children are also building their sense of space and proportion when playing. Advanced versions of Lego toys are even used in computer programming, robot design and other courses at high school and college level.
Although many primary school teachers are girls, I have never been a Lego expert since I was a child. Until you get first-hand information on how to play with these toys, you may not be satisfied with just using them as a teaching tool. So, my request is: find some Lego plastic blocks in the storage room and basement and spend some time studying how to play. Count how many nails there are, how big the area is, and build several towers. I promise you can think about math now.
Lego can be used to establish a partial and harmonious thinking mode.
For younger mathematics learners, merging and decomposing numbers is the most critical part to establish the sense of numbers needed for mathematical calculation. Students start with some iconic numbers 5 and 6, and move towards the most important number 10.
Lego cubes are very suitable for this part of the total exploration game! Compared with other popular mathematical tools (dominoes and dice), these square toys have obvious marking bands for children to count. These fish fillets are usually in groups of two, and counting two fish fillets is much faster than counting each fish fillet separately. Through practice, students can master the arrangement of panels without going through them all several times.
Students can combine two or more Lego cubes in different ways and find out all the rounded corners. They can take a larger square, cover a part of it with a smaller square, and then calculate the number of remaining uncovered fillets.
Lego = existing arrangements and combinations of different colors.
As a third-grade math teacher, I spent a lot of time drawing permutations and combinations, building models to guide students how to jump through permutations and combinations, split permutations and combinations, and use different small items (raisins, pennies, grains, etc. ) to construct permutation and combination. In a word, knowing the truth and how permutation and combination work laid the foundation for my group of math students to establish multiplication thinking mode.
It is very useful to collect some Lego toys at hand for multiplication courses. I divided some squares to strengthen the regional model, explain the square calculation, and remind my students of the commutativity in multiplication. Here are some photos about how to teach the possibility of multiplication and division with Lego.
Use Lego to calculate fractions
The grades always seem to beat my students. When we talk about different sizes of whole or think about changing from whole to whole, things will become blurred. The only way to prevent the anxiety of score calculation is to provide students with a lot of opportunities to make the score contact with the real thing. Patternblocks is a popular fractional modeling tool, but I prefer Lego. (When the hexagon is used as a whole, Patternblocks can only be divided into six blocks; Lego cubes have more possibilities. )
Explore Average, Median, Mode and Range with Lego
When analyzing data, senior primary school students will explore various methods to express the middle trend-average value in their set of data. In order to find the geometric mean, students quickly learned to combine all squares into a whole and then divide them into models of equal size. But few students understand why they have to do these things to get the geometric mean. Even if there are no music towers of different heights, students still have first-hand learning experience about geometric mean.
Two Skills of Teaching Children to Learn Mathematics with Lego
1. "explore" instead of "play"
To tell the truth, when you took out Lego toys for the first time in math class, all the students wanted to use these squares to build towers, plan wars and exchange squares with each other. But you don't need to fight this trend, accept it bit by bit. Ask your students to explore the mathematical possibilities of Lego cubes within a specified time.
2. Put Lego toys in the bag.
When preparing for Lego teaching, I seldom give students the opportunity to touch the complete Lego cube. I will carefully select the squares that I think students will use in the task in advance and put them in a self-styled bag. I also believe that students can understand how to return all bags containing diamonds.