I heard tale of a teacher who recently went on a course about Lego learning in the classroom. One thing that surprised him about the training was that there was no Lego involved, it was all about the structured design process and getting the kids to write down those ideas in a way the teacher wanted them to. This got me thinking quite carefully about teachers and the purpose of education and learning. These days there is so much in the curriculum that time is precious. We do not have time to let kids sit down with piles of Lego and let their creativity run wild. I think that wouldn’t be as measurable and wouldn’t necessarily justify a teacher being present. The kids might come up with stuff all on their own. Imagine what they would do left to their own devices with piles of Lego. What would they do? What would they learn and would it be any less valuable than what a class could produce? Do children need teachers to learn or can they learn by themselves?
When we first began homeschooling my eldest was delighted to have as much time to spend on Lego as he wanted. He created non stop for weeks, it was often his only interest. Everything he created came with an amazing back story which he loved telling us. We gave him books on Lego which he devoured. We got little Lego challenges off the internet and had a go at some of them. We designed a piece of furniture with Lego bases and made it together to display it. We learned about hydraulics and made a syringe hydraulic Lego lift which attached to his castle. We went to a Lego exhibition. We used Lego to make stop motion videos on an app. At no point did I make him write a design process. That’s not to say I don’t value that process and we did have discussions on it in a roundabout way. We talked about his next design, we talked about testing it and then what changes he might like. We looked at what other people had built and designed on line and how it fit certain purposes like the man with one arm who built himself a Lego arm. There was so much and it needed time to come out. Time that simply wasn’t present in a classroom. ‘Pack away now it’s time for maths, the reading hour or art, it doesn’t matter that you aren’t finished doing that thing you’re interested, this is more important.’
I don’t think that only ever doing one thing is healthy long term. He had plenty of other interests as we went along, but Lego was always his favourite go to. Left to have time and motivation he created amazing things, even winning a couple of competitions. It is easy for people who homeschool to worry that they won’t learn unless someone qualified is teaching them, but in my experience children can learn amazing things themselves. We are facilitators to that learning. We can show them that there are Lego books. We can ask them if they’ve seen this amazing video online. We can help them enter the competition. We can ask for their help to build a world war 1 bunker for a history project. They do not always need us to teach in a way so structured that it forgets that they want to learn things in their own tie, in their own way.
The Messy Old Fashioned Home School Kitchen 