Third Thursday: Lego® Blocks {Linky party}

Welcome to my second Third Thursday Three for All linky party.  Once  a month, I challenge myself to come up with 3 ways to use a different activity/game, teach a specific skill or 3 different resources to address different activities/goals.  The “for All” part comes in when other Speech bloggers join in with their new or old posts on how they use the same activities.  I LOVE the fact that I can get a bunch of ideas in one place.

My choice for this month was another activity: Lego® or Duplo® bricks.  Pinterest has a variety of different ideas for using these in therapy.

1.  Just building it:  I have a lot of clients who are on the Autism Spectrum.  A lot of them really like Lego’s®.  It’s a great way to work on executive functioning and problem solving.  Can they plan which pieces they need to get?  What if a piece is missing?  What could they do to fix it.  I’ve found step by step photos to build simple items to use with clients who need to have the instructions broken down to a single step per page.  You can work on concepts:  Put the red brick on top or under the yellow brick.  Bring in some of the Lego® bricks into a social skills group to work on conversational skills.  Boys tend to converse more when they are “doing” something where girls are more comfortable just talking.  Can the group work together to build something simple?

2.  Sentence Construction:  This was one of my first blog posts.  It’s a great way to work on how you can “construct” a sentence.  I definitely adapted this idea from another blogger-but of course I can’t remember who.  Please take credit for this!  I wrote out the sentences first-and then made up different labels using the Avery Address and return address labels.  I have a lot of non-readers so I added Boardmaker symbols to the sides of the blocks so that the kids could read them.

3.  Prefixes and Suffixes:  I work on prefixes and suffixes with some of my middle school and high school aged students.  I was looking for a “fun” way to address them in our therapy sessions.  I love that you can physical move the prefixes to strengthen their understanding that the word meanings change based on the prefix or suffix attached.