LEGO Education 45020 Creative LEGO Brick Set (Pack of 1000)
available on Amazon
*Copyright
you are welcome to teach these plans, but please do not copy or distribute in any way without giving appropriate credit to Regina Slaugh, thanks! Below are three different curriculums that I have taught.
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2018 Mini-figure Story Art ages 5-8
This class is based on building with themes. You need a baseplate and brick set per student. Plus mini-figures. You start each class with reading a great age appropriate book. Then teach how to build familiar shapes out of Lego. For example show a cactus picture and ask the students which bricks could make a cactus? After practicing turning regular items into Lego shapes, the students are free to build a story scene!
I got custom mini-figures, but you could use the Lego Education Fantasy mini-figure set for storytelling and you would get something like this:
Read a story each day, ideally it would go along with the theme, but if you have to borrow from teachers or the library, just look for something funning and entertaining like Mo Willems books. Then discuss what was good about the story and tell the students what story they will be building for the day. If you only have one set of mini-figures, each student will get a different module to build and the book definitely won't need to follow a theme.
1) Western (Gold Prospector could be a cowboy too.)
build a cactus, a stream, a cave, hide gold(yellow) bricks in your scene
2) Pirate(Pirates)
build a pirate ship, or a treasure island
3) Castle Attack(Guards)
make a castle or fortress facade, perhaps build a bridge to the entrance way
4) Flying & Magic (Aladdin and Flying Super Boy)
make a building the taller the better, a city skyline, a house, or even a park for them to fly over.
5) Princess Day (Elsa and Brave Princess or Red Riding Hood)
make a snowman, or a sled, or an ice castle, or a cottage.
6) Underwater and Mermaids Day (Mermaids)
make some fish out of bricks
7) Magic Day (Witch and Wizard)
make a witches lair with shelves and potions and a cauldron, bones, snakes, purple, black, and gray, fire, torches, etc whatever you ca think of.
8) Elf and King Day
Build the base plate into a maze use cheap marbles like you get in the dollar store floral section and have the marble go from elf to king. This is the king's royal garden. There can be flowers or a water fountain or bridge. Maybe a hut for the elf to hide in or little furniture.
9) Wall-E and Astronaut
build robots or space ships or star fighters
10) Ninja
build a training gym(dojo) make obstacles for climbing walls, jumping, balance, swimming, running, punching, jousting, target practice, etc.
just base a day on each character and have lots of building ideas, pictures, instructions available for each theme. For the best ideas on what to build each day, get books by Sarah Dees or visit her website Frugal Fun For Boys.
2018 Ultimate Lego ages ages 9+
1-3) My Own Creation(MOC): Buy sets that are creatior 3 in 1 or that have several rebuilding instructions available on Rebrickable.com. If the students rebuild the same bricks into 3 entirely different things they will start to learn how to use bracket bricks, slopes, curves, and other decorative bricks to better advantage. This could take several days to complete or all ten days to complete if students rebuild more than one set 3 ways. Bonus is rebuilding into a new creation of their own Design. Most that I have planned turn out to be one or two vehicles plus one or two animals.
4) Mosaic: I have a teacher set of Play Platoon basic bricks for this project. They are super cheap and come in all colors of the rainbow. Lego doesn't provide this kind of set anymore.
5) Micro: ask kids how you would represent large things with small bricks. Show some examples. This will help accessorize vignettes tomorrow.
6) Vignette: This is a tiny lego scene. It is the poetry of Lego Building, you say a lot with a little. This build is 16x16 dot baseplate or less. The bigger challenge is in labeling it. Vignettes always have a label. (such as "Everything is Awesome!") I provide 1"x2" cards for the kids to label each vignette. They come up with thoughtful and humorous stuff. The label is the most important part. Every kid could make a label for the exact same vignette and it would still be a great learning activity.
7) Diorama: A scene larger than 16x16.
8) Movie: using a stop motion app, make a movie with about 30 frames.
9) Brick Art: build something using mainly basic bricks (only do this if you have a lot of basic bricks of course and they are hard to find)
10) Useful Lego: Build an iPhone dock, a desk organizer, a pencil holder, a toothbrush holder, a vase cover, a picture frame, a key rack, coasters, a cake stand, cupcake display, or a candy dispenser.
2016, Brick Art
Do you love playing
with LEGO? Then this is the perfect class for you! If you don’t
love coloring or painting, don’t worry; you can still be a brilliant artist!
Just dive in, have fun, and be amazed at the masterpieces you will create!
You will build your very own sculptures, mosaics, towers, planes, and
cars all while learning about important art concepts such as 2D vs 3D, art medium, color theory, how to tell stories with art, and famous artists
like Vincent Van Gogh, M.C. Escher, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd
Wright, and of course world renowned brick artist, Nathan Sawaya.
Supplies: 500 basic bricks, some round and clear bricks to use for eyes on the monster mosaics and to decorate cars and planes, Lego wheels, a baseplate, and 1 6-quart sterilite storage.
$45 per student
$45 per student
The Plan:
1)Nathan Sawaya and 3D Lego Art. we talk about infusing fun and whimsy into our art and look at the work of the world's finest Lego Brick Artist. We build whatever we think is fun to build like Nathan Sawaya's Blocky the dog, cats, rockets, dragons, crocodiles, dragons, buildings, etc.
2) Crazy Creatures and story telling. We learn all about mosaic and making 2D art out of little pieces. Then they get a baseplate and make their own fun creative creature face mosaic. They all have a trading card for their creature where they fill out his name, favorite things to eat, his habitat, and his special powers and characteristics. I encourage them to be as creative and imaginative as possible. This is a nice take home souvenir from early on in the class and gets them excited about the potential of LEGO mosaic.
3) Andy Warhol Day and Pop Art. We build fun things from pop culture like minecraft creepers, Perry the Platypus, , cats, mario, pokemon, etc. I draw up instructions for several popular builds or have pictures of Simple Lego builds for inspiration.
4) "The Two Franks" and a building contest. I show them some of the worlds amazing buildings. I especially enjoy talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water" and showing some of the work of Frank Ghery, I finish up with Burj al Arab and the Dubai tower. I bring in hundreds of duplos to get them started on high towers and let them build whatever architecture they like, pyramids, secret gardens, igloos, schools, houses, stores, space stations, etc. This year I want to experiment with the new stackable baseplate towers on building day as well. I have a bunch of paper blue ribbons and each one gets first place for something They always say "best" or "most". (best color, tallest tower, funnest design, most original building, best landscaping, most creative, best monster house, etc). Again these paper ribbons are nice to take home and show families.
5) Marble Mazes, MC Escher, Mandalas, and Andrew Lipson I show some fun Lego Optical Illusions. We see who can build the most challenging, but not impossible mazes.
6) "Wings and things" I talk about symmetry and have them identify examples. I have a lot of wing pieces I bring in and space mini-figures to play with and this is a really fun day.
7) I talk about color theory and have them discuss the color themes of different Holidays and popular brands. I have a bunch of pictures of racing cars in different color schemes and I let them make cars in fun color schemes. It will be fun to have a full rainbow of bricks this year for this day! For the last 20 minutes of class I let them race their cars down an incline.
8) They always want to do this day twice, so, we do! Usually we race about 30 minutes. Cars and races part II I also talked about Picasso this day and had them build abstract creatures if they are interested.
9) Creativity Day, I talk about what an art medium is and how a LEGO brick is just one kind. Then we talk about the fun of mixed media. I use books by Lois Ehlert to illustrate mixed media in a simlple way and then we do dioramas with small toys, rubberbands, and card stock backgrounds
10) Lego game design, design your own lego game.
*********************************************************************************1)Nathan Sawaya and 3D Lego Art. we talk about infusing fun and whimsy into our art and look at the work of the world's finest Lego Brick Artist. We build whatever we think is fun to build like Nathan Sawaya's Blocky the dog, cats, rockets, dragons, crocodiles, dragons, buildings, etc.
2) Crazy Creatures and story telling. We learn all about mosaic and making 2D art out of little pieces. Then they get a baseplate and make their own fun creative creature face mosaic. They all have a trading card for their creature where they fill out his name, favorite things to eat, his habitat, and his special powers and characteristics. I encourage them to be as creative and imaginative as possible. This is a nice take home souvenir from early on in the class and gets them excited about the potential of LEGO mosaic.
3) Andy Warhol Day and Pop Art. We build fun things from pop culture like minecraft creepers, Perry the Platypus, , cats, mario, pokemon, etc. I draw up instructions for several popular builds or have pictures of Simple Lego builds for inspiration.
4) "The Two Franks" and a building contest. I show them some of the worlds amazing buildings. I especially enjoy talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water" and showing some of the work of Frank Ghery, I finish up with Burj al Arab and the Dubai tower. I bring in hundreds of duplos to get them started on high towers and let them build whatever architecture they like, pyramids, secret gardens, igloos, schools, houses, stores, space stations, etc. This year I want to experiment with the new stackable baseplate towers on building day as well. I have a bunch of paper blue ribbons and each one gets first place for something They always say "best" or "most". (best color, tallest tower, funnest design, most original building, best landscaping, most creative, best monster house, etc). Again these paper ribbons are nice to take home and show families.
5) Marble Mazes, MC Escher, Mandalas, and Andrew Lipson I show some fun Lego Optical Illusions. We see who can build the most challenging, but not impossible mazes.
6) "Wings and things" I talk about symmetry and have them identify examples. I have a lot of wing pieces I bring in and space mini-figures to play with and this is a really fun day.
7) I talk about color theory and have them discuss the color themes of different Holidays and popular brands. I have a bunch of pictures of racing cars in different color schemes and I let them make cars in fun color schemes. It will be fun to have a full rainbow of bricks this year for this day! For the last 20 minutes of class I let them race their cars down an incline.
8) They always want to do this day twice, so, we do! Usually we race about 30 minutes. Cars and races part II I also talked about Picasso this day and had them build abstract creatures if they are interested.
9) Creativity Day, I talk about what an art medium is and how a LEGO brick is just one kind. Then we talk about the fun of mixed media. I use books by Lois Ehlert to illustrate mixed media in a simlple way and then we do dioramas with small toys, rubberbands, and card stock backgrounds
10) Lego game design, design your own lego game.
2015, class based on the new non-basic-brick Lego Creative sets.
"LEGO art"
12 students
supplies=Lego Juniors Racecar Rally (I split this among two students), Lego Creative Supplement, baseplate, 6qt storage container. $45
Lego doesn't sell a basic bricks set anymore, so resulting projects won't be ah, erm... basic. The bricks have many, bright, wild colors and the majority of them are no longer square or rectangular, but a variety of other shapes. Therefore, the projects will be more bright and abstract. My new curriculum will have less Nathan Sawaya "Brick Art" and more Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse in them. One of the first rules of Lego is to work with what you've got.
1) Free Build (I talk about Pop Art and how ordinary objects even bananas and soup cans can be made into art. Pop Art is really trendy right now, so I like helping the kids become aware of the styles of art they are seeing all around them.)
2) Mosaic. I talk about 2D vs 3D and about how mosaics are made up of little pieces. I usually have them make a crazy creature mosaic which they name and give super powers to.
3) Picasso: building picasso pets. These should look like creatures made out of puzzle pieces. They pick 15 pieces and start from the ground up. Two for feet, two for legs, a few more for chest and body, then arms, bottom of face, top of face. If they have eye pieces, I try to encourage them to use them for these projects. Obviously it doesn't take long to build a picasso pet, but I they can build and rebuild and make a whole family of cubist creatures. Its lots of fun to see what they come up with and which ones are the craziest.
4) Modernism in architecture: buildings. I show them all the buildings with modernist architecture and talk about how buildings don't have to be just rectangular. Then we build the most creative structures we can. I give awards for each building (most creative, tallest, best color scheme, best gardens, craziest, funniest, most detailed, etc). They are just fill in the blank paper ribbons, but it is fun for the kids.
5) Op art (show art of Andrew Lipson especially MC Escher) Make marble mazes which are a"mazing", but not Op art. (oh well)
6) Symmetry & Mandala art (show Lego Mandalas, but the kids will likely build spaceships, airplanes, jets, and other symmetric things that fly)
7) Futurism (since this is about speed and often cars, this is cars day. We build and race them. I keep the wheels hidden until cars day, so this is the first day anyone builds a car and they aren't bored of them. You might want to do this day much sooner if the sets come with wheels. My "track is just made from black poster board and a table with one side of the legs down. It works great!)
8) Kineticism: What a fun art movement for little kids! Just add string or rubber bands if you like and make anything that twists, swings, spins, or launches.
9) Fauvism: "wild" build anything in wild colors, build wild animals, or better yet build wild animals with wild colors. Often the cars day takes two days and I don't get to this, but if students especially girls get bored of cars, they usually enjoy building fauvist flower gardens and animals. This year the free build took two days and they build a lot of animals then, so this is a day I never really get to.
10) Fun and games. Play Lego Match-4-Bingo. Make or play a game out of LEGO
daily fast finishers: for the younger kids I have a bunch of Lego coloring pages and markers they can color if they finish building early. They also like to race cars the last few minutes of class every day after the day we put up the race track.
*In Lego Match-4-Bingo each kid picks four lego pieces. The Caller picks a random piece out of the Bingo bag, whoever has the matching piece marks it. The first person to get all 4 of their pieces picked wins.
Ultimate Lego Design Ages 10-14,
14 students
This is a studio style class. I have a giant Lego set that all the students share, this year it was about 20,000 bricks and 20 baseplates. You can have fewer Legos as long as the kids recycle projects and so you don't run out of Legos. Each student has a passport with projects highlighting all different types of LEGO art. Most students have one favorite style already and this class gives them a trip around the Lego world to find other fun types and styles of creating with Lego. They can do the same build 10 times, or try one of each.
We start together with the Master Builder Contest on day one and then I pass out Lego Passports with all the projects in them and a place to check-mark them when they are finished. There are three building levels they can achieve.
Lego Designer: 10 Lego Builds
Gold Level Lego Designer: 10 Builds plus a vignette
Ultimate Lego Designer: 10 Build plus a vignette, plus a 220-brick sphere or large sculpture.
I always have students who are speeding through the entire list of 20 and others that are painstakingly upgrading their original build everyday. I try to teach about creative design and different styles of Lego art as much as I can, but time is short and most of the learning comes through self-guided exploration and observing other students. Quantity isn't better or worse than quality in the builds, they learn so much either way. When students work together on projects with a partner they have more fun, so I encourage this whenever I see an opening for it. Especially on the 220 piece sphere project, I always require partners for that one.
Lego Builds
1. Diorama-Large scene or landscape
2. Vignette: small scene, usually 1or 2 mini-figures with a baseplate that is 16x16 or less. Include a speech bubble or caption.
3. Design a mock professional Lego set.
4. Land Vehicle, 5. 220-piece sphere (see the unoffical Lego Builder's Guide), 6. Functional Lego, such as a candy dispenser, pencil holder, or picture frame, 7. Micro build-something in microscale (smaller than mini-figure scale) 8. architecture (castle, tower, house, store, playground, etc.)
9. Wings or Symmetry
10. Pop Culture (movie characters and items, video game items, brand logos, iconic items, sports logos, etc)
11. Surreal-bizarre, dreamlike, scenes or creatures. Often with impossible things happeing or things put together in weird ways
12. Food (either sculpture or mosaic), 13. Micro City
14. Lego Figure (people, robots, etc)
15. Animal or crazy creature (3D or mosaic)
17. Master Builder Project (so named for the contests used to hire builders for Lego Land. You have one hour to build a project on a given theme, usually uses basic bricks)
18. Moving Parts (besides wheels)
19. Marble Maze
20. Project Upgrade (take any project and make it significantly better.)
Here are all the kinds of Lego Art, it is probably too complex for kids to absorb, but perhaps it will help you as a teacher visualize the different families and genres of LEGO art. My goal in the LEGO design class is to get kids to try a little bit of everything. Especially Vignette, Sculpture (3D), and Mosaic. You can see what a student knows already and what they still have yet to try. Do they always build buildings? do they like to have dioramas with tons of mini-figures? do they like to build from instructions? do they build cars every day? Do they build mostly 2D mosaics? What new things can they try?
The World Map of LEGO art
Most of the following were built using instructions, I created instructions for a few items I thought the students would enjoy!
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| Pop Culture |
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| Dragon 3D Lego Art |
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| Perry the Platypus Pop Culture |
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| Pop Culture/Mosaic |
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| Princess 3D sculptures (these are pretty advanced work, no instructions!) |
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| Building Day |
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| heart mosaic/sculptures |
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| 220 piece sphere (extremely difficult!) |
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| pop culture, and tower building |
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| I love all the little piggies in the white picket fence with a mixed media farmhouse background. |
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| A fun wheels creation, a white dog sculpture, a brown dog sculpture, minecraft background, a purple Stricktly Briks baseplate, this project has it all! The ribbon on the Minion is leftover from the tower building day where everyone gets a ribbon for building something. |
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| mosaics, I love the Play Platoon company for providing every color in the rainbow for mosics! I provided instructions for the nyan cat, but the Lego was student designed. |
Without supplementing our Lego class with Play Platoon (or Brickyard), we have fewer 3D sculptures and mosaics because we don't have a full rainbow of colors and a full array of shapes. The following projects are 100% Lego and typical of what I had the year before.
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| 3D sculpture |
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| maze |
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| tower |
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| Bob from Monster's vs Aliens |
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| buildings |
RE: How to get a class set of Lego Bricks?
So you are looking to put together a Lego class for your school. My classes have a supply fee and the kids pay around 35-40$ and keep their Legos at the end. For your class you might try getting a grant. I don’t know much about grants, but I noticed for example our PTA Reflections had a grant available for schools to get art supplies and Legos are great for 3D art and especially to get boys to be creative, it was statewide, so the PTA could apply for you if you have one and your state offers grants. Sonic has a Limeades for Learning program for raising money for classroom enrichment sets and a Lego class would probably qualify. You can also post your desire to get a starter set for a school on Facebook and hope for the best. You could have the kids pay a smaller fee such as $10 per semester and after a few semesters the class set would be paid for. Perhaps a local company could sponsor your class as well.
The cheapest way to buy a starter LEGO set is local garage sales and classified adds. This is what I did my first year. Look for people selling off their childhood Lego set INCLUDING mini figures. If they are selling complete sets they are typically asking the same price or more as brand new Lego, but if you get an old box of assorted, the prices are more fair. If the mini-figures are gone, then the set is picked over and not as good of a deal. I think people charge about $10 a pound for Lego, take a scale with you or have a box that you know holds a pound of Lego. Most online sellers of bulk Lego have picked out all the big, useful pieces and are selling what no one wants, beware. Used bulk Lego usually has 10-20% Mega Blocks mixed in. So check, and if a bunch of the set is Mega Blocks pay less or don’t buy. I tell students to throw Mega Block bricks in the garbage, but they can use the Mega Block plate pieces if they want to.
To instantly get a massive amount of Lego for super cheap, buy from Play Platoon, when I tested non-lego companies this was the winner, they look and feel almost identical to Lego, if you don’t mention it, most kids won’t notice the difference. I would get the regular and pastel set and mix them together. These sets also need wheels added to them.
I had to use Play Platoon one year when Lego had discontinued ALL their basic brick sets at the same time and had no new sets released. I have a box of Play Platoon leftover and try to hide this box of nonLego from my students, but it always gets pulled out and is super popular because the color selection is so great and they can always find what they need. They don’t notice or care that it isn’t Lego.
New Lego (new sets are released and others are retired every December and June, so this list is constantly changing. However the”Classic" sets usually last several years before disappearing. Also, Black Friday at Walmart usually features a giant box of Lego for a great price)
The absolute best value for a new Lego set right now (10/2017) are these two sets one is for Boys and one is for Girls when purchased from Walmart. Beware the kids will gravitate to the instruction booklets for the first few classes before they are willing to branch out into creative building.
With the above sets you also need to buy Wheels separately. You can buy wheels in these places:
on Amazon in sets of 10 car chassis
ebay (seller forkidsofallages) sets of 10 car chassis
Brickyard Wheels set (18 vehicle chassis for a classroom set) (I love this brand, almost identical to LEGO!!!)
For baseplates there are two options.
you can buy the Lego gray baseplate and then with a set of sharp scissors or kitchen shears cut it into 4 smaller plates, using the scissors round all four corners. This is a wonderful size and makes each student baseplate about $3.50. The other Lego baseplates are ridiculously priced, I won’t buy them. No student has ever realized that I make the small gray baseplates myself. The other wonderful option is to buy baseplates from Strictly Briks company. They are a dedicated baseplate company. Green is always the most popular color and then blue for water, but the kids love all the other colors too.
The set, wheels, and baseplate would be the minimum for a Lego class, add about 200 basic bricks per student if possible.
On Amazon the basic bricks set is this one. Creative Lego Brickset by Lego Education or of course Play Platoon (1000 piece) or Brickyard (1100piece). Don’t buy other non Lego brands.
Make sure to budget for some plastic storage bins too. I like these ones: 41 qt sterilite.
The “Build It” lego book series I found at the Library this month has some great instructions for how to build with the type of Lego bricks in the “Classic” Lego sets. If you decide to use basic bricks such as Lego Education or Play Platoon or Brickyard (also very good), I have some instructions on how to build a few basic things, let me know:)
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