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Welcome to the Curriculum Lab podcast where we celebrate innovative educators, entrepreneurs and their impact on education. Let's talk about educational strategies to empower learners and inspire growth.
Welcome to episode 6 of "EdTechVerse" podcast, where we explore Lego STEAM park.
Are you amazed by your child’s curiosity about the world around them?
Are you wondering how best to nurture this intelligent spark?
How can you build upon every toddler’s natural desire to explore and understand how things work?
The Lego STEAM park helps young children develop their motor skills as they find their way around different bricks to build boats and gates, wheels and stages.
With every build, they get to know more about gears, tracks, pulleys and chain reactions. The possibilities are endless and easily adaptable to fit any learning environment.
During this early childhood development phase, creative play can help toddlers learn about:
Cause and effect
Spatial awareness
Observing and describing
Problem solving
Role play and collaboration
As you co-create lego models of the world, you could also craft scenarios with your children, helping them develop the ability to imagine and communicate ideas.
Here’s an example of a lesson plan for setting up a Lego stage for a dance performance:
Step 1: Prepare
* Consider the existing vocabulary of your toddler and pre-teach any related words you would like them to learn, such as act, show, performance, square, circle, triangle, stage, enter, exit, audience
* Decide when and how to introduce lesson content, activities or concepts
Step 2: Connect
* Talk about the different kinds of music and dance that come from different parts of the world, such as the lion dance - a traditional Chinese dance often performed during Chinese New Year celebrations
* Tell your toddler that you are going to read out a story about a family going to the STEAM park for a dance performance
Parker, the park manager, has created a new dance performance for visitors to enjoy.
The advertisement video for this brand new show went viral on social media and 12-year-old Miley
excitedly showed it to her parents.
The Matthews family decided to buy tickets for all four of them, including 2-year-old Mikey.
“Wow! Are we really going to the dance performance?” Miley asked.
“You were so excited that we thought it would be a really good idea for a family trip
over the weekend,” her mom replied.
“And it would be wonderful for your little brother to see the talented dancers performing
live. He is a bit of a dancer himself,” her dad added.
They all looked lovingly at little Mikey who was happily ambling towards them, wanting
a hug.
* Show videos or photos of what stages for dance performances look like
Step 3: Construct
* Build a stage for a dance performance with your toddler
* Consider asking questions like: Should we have a rectangular, circular or triangular shape? How big should the stage be? How many people can dance on the stage at the same time? How do the dancers enter and exit the stage? Where does the audience sit? How big is the audience?
Step 4: Continue
* Depending on the preference of your toddler, he/she could listen to dance music, do a simple dance or draw something with crayons.
At this age, children are keen learners of letters, shapes and numbers and play-acting is an essential step towards building language and communication skills, laying the groundwork for connecting letters to words, then words to ideas they represent. The Lego STEAM park can be seen as a tool for storytelling, just as puppets are often used in early childhood education to model real events in children’s lives.
Asking the question about the number of dancers and the size of the audience leads to a counting activity with Lego figures. The different Lego bricks can be grouped by colour or patterns to form the stage. Geometric shapes come to life when the child has to decide whether the stage is rectangular, circular or triangular.
Building the stage with Lego bricks is a three-dimensional construction, encouraging artistic expression of spatial arrangements. Asking children to think about how dancers enter and exit the stage, where the audience sits encourages them to take on different perspectives. If that concept is too abstract, ask them to imagine that they are one of the dancers or a member of the audience and prepare for different responses!
We hope today's EdTechVerse episode on the Lego STEAM park shares how children learn through play and shows you that nurturing interdisciplinarians is a fun process. Join us in the next episode as we talk about science fiction-themed books for toddlers.
As always, stay curious, and keep learning!