Turns out, Legos aren't just great for endurance training.
Grade-school teacher Alycia Zimmerman shared an amazing way to use Legos to teach her kids to build key math skills. Taking something kids love to play with and applying it to education? That's pretty genius.
"Let’s face it though—many elementary school teachers are women who, like me, did not grow up as Lego experts," Zimmerman wrote on Scholastic three years ago. "And until you’ve had some firsthand experience playing around with the blocks, you may not be comfortable using it as a teaching tool. So, here is my plea: Find some Lego bricks in a storage closet or basement, and take some time exploring how they work. Count the studs, explore the dimensions, build some towers. And I guarantee, you’ll now be thinking … MATH!"
There are so many possibilities with these plastic bricks.
You can teach kids parts vs. wholes.
Square numbers make so much sense when they're visually explained like this.
And fractions seem way less intimidating with these colorful bricks.
Zimmerman even goes into multiplication, division, mean, median, mode and range. You really can build nothing into something, brick by brick.