Lego Juniors and Child Development

I have a 4 year old son, which means we have Lego bricks all over our house. He is constantly building things with his Lego sets. He has an amazing imagination and comes up with some pretty creative stuff.

Not only are Lego bricks fun to play with, they also help kids develop some pretty important skills. We use Lego bricks in our preschool class to teach a variety of developmental skills. I’m happy that my son loves Lego bricks because I know how much they are helping develop these skills. Let’s talk about some of these skills and I’ll give you some ideas on how to use Lego bricks to develop them.

Social and Emotional Skills: Lego bricks really help kids build social and emotional skills. From distributing bricks to deciding what to build and agreeing on designs, playing with bricks teaches and develops important skills. Negotiation, compromise, respect for others, helpfulness and following rules. Invite some friends over and help them learn to share and take turns while playing with the bricks. Help them know what to say when they are wanting a certain brick or disagree on what to build. Teaching them how to talk to their friends helps them develop social skills and empathy.

Physical Skills: Lego bricks also help kids develop Physical Skills by fine tuning their motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Manipulating the small bricks into their proper places requires a steady hand and a keen understanding of perspective and space.

Cognitive skills: These skills are developed through the understanding of concepts like size, shape, numbers, order, area, length and patterns. I’ve noticed that playing with bricks has helped my son focus and concentrate better. While playing with bricks, play a “following directions” game. Ask your child to get three blue bricks and stack them on top of each other. Give him time to complete that command, then add another like, ” now add a red brick, and three more blue bricks”. See if he can continue the pattern on his own.

Language Skills: Asking open-ended questions at the right time can develop language skills. Questions can lead to very long descriptions of what’s being built and the characters involved.  I usually don’t even have to ask questions. My son just loves building and is constantly making up new “scenes” and telling me all about what he’s working on.

Lego bricks aren’t just for young children.  My 11 year old daughter loves her Lego sets that are geared towards girls, and so do her friends. I was a little surprised that she asked me if I would take her to the store to let her buy a set with her own money. My 9 year old son is always taking his Lego bricks outside so he can play with them on the sidewalk with his friends.

My kids favorite sets are these new LEGO® JUNIORS. They are designed to give children age 4-7 a great first experience with LEGO bricks through iconic, fun and easy to build models. LEGO JUNIORS sets contain quick start elements and numbered pre-packed bags that can be built without help from Mom or Dad – which makes any small builder extra proud.

I love how each box set can stack on top of each other like Lego bricks do.

I love how these sets are made to build a variety of different things. When you follow the instructions, you open a different pouch of bricks.

The instructions include different ways to build the sets. They call it build and rebuild.

The sets come with a Lego Brick Separator. This little tool is brilliant! Look what it can do:

I love the detail that Lego adds to their sets. I love the fire on the torches, the flags, the painting on the walls and our favorite character is the skeleton. He was always in jail because he’s a bad guy. In the pink set, the horse has carrots to eat and in the red set, there are gold pieces for the treasure chest. My son loves the gold. He pretends he’s a giant pirate finding tiny gold treasure. We have so much fun together. As soon as I walk in the door, he asks, “Wanna play blocks with me Mamma?”

I hope you can spend some quality time with your kids building cities, towns or even pirate swords. What are some of your kids favorite things to build with Lego bricks?

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.