LEGO: One of Our Favorite Learning Toys

We are a LEGO family, through and through. These simple yet phenomenal interlocking blocks are familiar to nearly everyone I know. They were my favorite toy as a child (and even into my early teens... shhhh, don't tell anyone). They were also RockerDad's favorite, too! See, we were meant for each other.

I immediately noticed what a great fine motor activity fitting those tiny bricks together was. Both his finger dexterity and finger strength were being developed and refined with each brick he chose and clicked into place.

He has gained many math skills while building as well. He now knows which combinations of bricks will equal other bricks or combinations. He is able to envision and integrate symmetry into his creations. He doesn't know that he knows all of this, of course. He just loves to build!

We keep our bricks in divided containers. (A few are pictured below.) We keep them sorted by size or similar attributes. When he was small, we used to sort his Mega Bloks by color... the same can easily be done with the smaller Lego bricks.



I know that much of this seems like common sense and I'm certainly not the first to notice or point out the immense versatility of Lego and similar building sets, but I realize that can be easy to overlook the educational value of things which may be right under our noses.



So.... how do YOU use your Lego blocks in your child's education?


RockerMom's Note: Robbie started playing with regular LEGO blocks when he was barely two. His big brother had a set and he liked them more than Tyler did. He was always heavily supervised due to the choking hazard.


Check out other (and admittedly, much cooler) math ideas over at