Gonna build a house.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been setting the girls a daily Lego challenge to try and stretch their ingenuity a little. They love their Lego but tend to want to build to plans from kits or make floor plans of buildings and play within those. That’s fine so far as it goes, but I’m keen to do more Lego education, so building up the skills to have some confidence in designing and building seemed like a good idea.

Maddy has really risen to the challenge, spurred on by various ideas in the Lego Ideas book and started to create more complex models of her own. After a build a cafe challenge last week, she went on to create a house and lots of miniature furniture. She’s quite taken with the micro model idea and loved making little picnic tables, sofas and chairs. In the end she had a rather lovely, and well furnished, cut away house.

This led us back to a project we did last year (which I haven’t blogged yet!) on planning gardens which was to work on area and perimeter as well as thinking out planning and incorporating elements on a wish list of garden features. Max did another project on working out the volume of the house by going around measuring it. Because we bought our house new, they remember the various sets of plans we had and the look of the house empty. We quite often mentally redesign the house, knocking out walls and altering the layout. Recently we’ve been thinking again about trying to create space downstairs by knocking through to the garage. We could do this in various ways, from putting in some new external doors to building a simple connecting conservatory (if we won the lottery!) so house planning and the idea of designing your own home has been a topic around here lately.

Having spent the time on making some models, Maddy at least is keen to take it further. There is an online designer to draw plans up on and I’ve seen some ideas for Lego geometry. I going to draw up another design sheet with a wish list if house design features and get the to become architects. They can build a house in Lego, calculate room sizes and volumes, have a go at scaling up to life size using maths and drawing out house details. Maths, design and art all in one go again. Home education orgo planning at its best. Now to actually do it 😉