Teaching With Building Blocks - Lesson 2: Graphing

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

Building blocks offer an awesome opportunity to teach kids abstract concepts in a  very visual way.

Graphing is all about making a visual representation of number concepts.  Blocks are a great tool to help kids see those concepts in 3 dimensions.

Plearning Activity:

Have your child take a handful of blocks from the box.

Choose four or five colors and have them separate the handful into those colors, throwing back any blocks that were not in those four or five colors.

Next, have your child count the different colors and find different ways that they can represent the number of each color using blocks.

You can see that for our graphs, we created two types of bar graphs, one 2D and the other 3D. 

See if your kids can come up with ideas on how to represent the numbers. You may be surprised with how creative they will get.

Advanced Plearning Activity:

You can also change it up and have your kids graph the blocks by the number of studs on the blocks.  This is a great opportunity to talk to your kids about analyzing data.  

Talk about how things have many different combinations of elements and that we can separate these blocks by color, number of studs, thickness, shape, and even combinations of elements such as blocks that have the same color as well as number of studs.  This type of observation and recording of data is key to the scientific process as they move forward.

Please check out our other learning activities and we would love if you left a comment in about other ideas you have about how to teach your kids while having fun.

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.