Pick Two – A Fun LEGO Math Game

My daughters’ school decided that this month was Math Facts Month. They’ve challenged all the kids to practice math, either fact families or math skills, each night.

They didn’t send home worksheets, flash cards, or any sort of manipulative. They just sent home a simple sheet of ideas and told us to have fun.

So, I took one of my girls’ current obsession, tossed it together with a little bit of math, and came up with a fun way to practice, Pick Two: LEGO Math Game.

What happens when you combine LEGOs with math? Well, at my house, you end up with a kid who is eager to do as much math as possible. True story.

Maybe this Math Facts Month will be a breeze.

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate and other affiliate links. Please see my Disclosure Page for more details.

Set up your activity

The set-up for this LEGO math game couldn’t be easier. Just grab a container and fill it with LEGO pieces. Try to find a variety of blocks of different shapes and sizes. I only used the basic bricks because the specialty pieces won’t really work well with this game.

I also grabbed a big base plate to give my daughter a place to organize her bricks.

The only other supplies we needed were a pencil and a piece of paper.

Play the game

The game itself is very simple.

My daughter would close her eyes and grab two LEGO bricks from the bucket. She then wrote out an addition problem for the set she pulled out using the bumps on the each brick.

(By the way, is there a technical term for the bumps on a LEGO? I have no idea!) 

For instance, if she pulled out a brick with 4 bumps and one with 8 bumps, she wrote the equation 8 + 4 =?. She then figured out the answer.

Many times she had to count the total number of bumps to get her answer. That’s okay, it’s all a part of learning to do addition.

The best part about this game is that it’s easily adaptable.

Try one of these other versions of this LEGO math game:

Create subtraction problems with your two bricks.

Pull two bricks and multiply the amount of bumps on each brick.

Practice greater than, lesser than, or equal to with your bricks

Your preschooler can decide which brick has the most amount of bumps or the least amount of bumps.

Have your preschooler count the total number of bumps on the two bricks s/he pulls out of the bin.

Grab three or more bricks and add them all together.

Grab four or more bricks and put them in order of largest to smallest, or vice versa.

Thank goodness for LEGO. Math Facts Month is going to be a breeze.

 

For more fun LEGO ideas, check out these other fun posts from the Early Elementary Blogging Team:

LEGO Classification – Printable Diagrams from Life Over C’s

LEGO number line for Addition and Subtraction from In The Playroom

Hands-On Synonym Blocks Matching Game from Raising Little Superhereos

Spelling With LEGOS! from Preschool Powol Packets

LEGO Boat Engineering Challenge from Handmade Kids Art

Using LEGO to find Syllables from Rainy Day Mum

Area and Perimeter with Lego Duplos from School Time Snippets

Plural Nouns with LEGO from Still Playing School

Combinations of Ten Using Lego Figures from Lemon Lime Adventures

How to do an Lego Engineering Project for Kindergarten, First, or Second Grade from Thriving STEM

Estimating and Probability with LEGO from Planet Smarty Pants

Lego Bar Graphs for First Grade from Look We’re Learning

LEGO Irregular Verb Matching Activity for Second Grade from Sugar Aunts

Exploring Symmetry with a Lego Firefly from Crafty Kids at Home