Lego Building Ideas and Challenges for Summer

I love a good Lego challenge, where you set kids out to try to build something with Legos. It’s fun to see what they come up with on their own, but of course there are a lot of great instructions out there for building various things with Legos. You can do it either way: give them the instructions and let them build that way, or ask if they can come up with something on their own before you give them the instructions.

One great thing about Lego challenges is that they become engineering projects even if you are following directions. So it’s a super fun learning activity kids might not even register as being educational.

Here are a few Lego builds that caught my eye recently.

Little Bins for Little Hands has a fun Lego zipline challenge. This is one kids can build on their own and then see how different ways of building an enclosure for a mini figure affect how fast the contraption zips.

Or you can learn how to tell time with a sundial by making a Lego sundial with this idea from Mom Brite. If you leave it outside undisturbed you can actually use it to tell time!

Frugal Fun 4 Boys and Girls has so many great Lego ideas it’s hard to narrow it down, but here are a couple of my favorites. Making catapults is a STEM classic, and this post shows two different ways to make a catapult out of Legos.

But the coolest one I found is this Lego air hockey table! This mini table is a fun challenge because while it would be pretty simple to put together you might have to hunt around for the right kinds of bricks to make it work. But I would definitely want to play with this one.

Do you have a favorite Lego building challenge you’ve done with your kids? I’d love to hear about it!

How to Build a Lego Night Light

Disaster Island Lego Building Challenge

Lego All About Me Printable

Lego Mats for Winter

LEGO Snowflake Building Challenge

Make a Chess Board out of Legos

A classic manipulative in the preschool and early elementary classroom is the snap cube, also known as math cubes, unifix cubes or unit cubes. These little one inch cubes often come in a set of 100 in 10 different colors, and they snap together so they’re easy to use for all sorts of math learning, measuring and more.

No Time for Flashcards has a cute robot printable to use with cubes to measure the height of each robot. That one is free but they also have other printable cube mats that are a paid resource.

Catherine & Co uses math cubes to teach kids about measuring volume. They make a letter from cubes and then measure the volume (there’s a printable worksheet in the post).

Pattern recognition is another fun and easy activity you can do with the cubes. You can use printables like these from Planning Playtime, or just make a pattern from cubes and have kids repeat it or figure out what comes next. There’s another good set of pattern printables at English Created Resources.

Because there are 10 sets of 10 cubes in a pack, these are great for teaching one to one correspondence, counting, sorting and basic addition and subtraction. English Created Resources has great printable number mats you can use to form the number from cubes and count out the number of cubes that corresponds to that number.

ParenTutor has a great collection of snap cube activity ideas, most of which are just pictures, but it’s work taking a look through the post for ideas for using them at home or in the classroom.

To give just a few of their examples, you can match linked blocks to the corresponding number of pieces, use blocks to find different ways to add up to 10, compare numbers and determine which one is more or less, skip counting and weighing different numbers of blocks.

You can also use unit cubes to learn letters, like with these super cute alphabet mats from Fun Learning for Kids. Kids can trace the letter, make it out of cubes and practice writing a word that starts with that letter.

Of course you can also use them to build things, since they are blocks, and there are tons of pattern mats on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also love these dinosaur themed mats from Lets Go to Learn on Etsy.

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