Tuesday, August 04, 2020

#MTBoSBlaugust - LEGO Ordinal Numbers Activity

I spent the 2019-2020 year on sabbatical in second grade. I'm not exaggerating when I say it was one of the best years I've spent in the classroom since moving to Richmond in 1994. I'm still mourning the loss of a full year with the kids, but I still learned so much. I will be forever grateful to the second grade team who became my friends and mentors.

One of the things I enjoyed about my time was creating activities for math instruction. They didn't always hit the mark, but I learned a lot from those experiences. One of the first activities we tried was a LEGO ordinal number activity. While planning for the unit, most of the resources we looked at were worksheets, but we wanted something that required them to apply their knowledge of ordinal numbers. 

The activity I developed required students to use LEGO bricks to build towers. Once the towers were assembled, students identified the color of bricks in certain positions. Here are some sample pages of the tasks and student recording sheets.



This was a very challenging activity early in the school year, particularly with the multi-step directions. There are 6 different task cards and a challenge activity, but most students only got through two examples during their partner work. I wish we could have revisited this later in the year as we continued to review concepts taught. I think student performances would have been different.

If you would like to try this with your students, you can download a PDF version. If you want to edit to change brick colors or numbers, you can download a Word version. All I ask is that you keep the attribution in place.

That's it for day 4 of #MTBoSBlaugust. I hope you'll come back tomorrow to see what else I have to share.

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