Teaching With Building Blocks - Lesson 5: Creative Writing and Sentence Diagraming

Learning with blocks is a fun way to introduce play into the classroom.  We want to encourage play learning, which we call "plearning" (I know I'm a dork) in order to trick our kids into learning so the process is less painless for everyone involved.

Sentence building is a lot like building with blocks.  You have the foundation which is the subject of the sentence.  Then you can make the building do things with the verbs or embellish the subject with adjectives.  You can also build on the verbs with adverbs.  

In this activity, we will be looking at doing some actual building of sentences using blocks as our materials.

Plearning Activity

Creative Writing -

Work with your kids to come up with a collection of words. Some of these can be their spelling words for the week and some can be ones that you make up with them.

We suggest you create:

• 10 nouns (ex. man, cat, dog…)

• 10 verbs (ex. jumped, ran, sat…)

• 10 adjectives (ex. three, smelly, large…)

• 10 adverbs (ex. quickly, loudly, softly…)

• 3 article adjectives (ex. the, a, an…)

Now see what sentences your kids can come up with using only those words. Stay strong and don’t let them make more blocks just to make the sentence make sense or be funnier. They need to try and use what they have. This is a creative problem solving activity.

You may or may not love how creative they will be (look at that face, you know that she is being ornery making silly sentences).

Simple Sentence Diagraming -

Once they have made their sentence, color code blocks as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and articles and have your kid label all of the different parts of speech involved.

Once this is finished, you can take it apart and do it all over again.

As an additional challenge, you can challenge your kids to create a story with the words or better yet, create a haiku about their mom or dad (oh yeah, explain to them what a haiku is).

How to make a LEGO-table in 5 minutes

The table in the above post was made in less than 5 minutes using Creative QT Baseplates

Creative QT is the creator of the Peel-and-Stick LEGO® compatible baseplates which make it super fast and easy to apply a LEGO building surface to any table or wall in minutes.

Check out the video below to see them in action and click here to see prices for making your own play surface.

 This product is not associated or endorsed by LEGO® or LEGO® Group of companies.