How To Teach Your Children Their ABCs With These Ingenious Lego Tricks

Teaching children how to read and write can feel like a mammoth task. However, its importance can't be overstated. A solid grasp of the English language is necessary for almost all interactions, especially now that we live in the age of social media, where a good grasp of the basics in terms of grammar and spelling is essential in any job.

That's why apps such as Grammarly are so popular. Mistakes can and do happen, but the more you know about the basics from the get-go, the less frequent these mistakes will be. But because there's so much to teach children, just the thought of outlining the basics can be overwhelming for you and them. Thankfully, there are solutions.

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It's no secret that children love to play, and this is something which we parents can capitalize on when teaching them their ABCs, and, later down the line, speech sounds and eventually spellings.

And one toy which children love with a passion is Lego, which just so happens to be the perfect tool to teach English.

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This is something which one mom clearly laid out on her aptly titled blog, This Reading Mama.

Becky, a parent who homeschools her children, wrote that she decided to use this method when contemplating "how I could combine Aluv's [her son's] obsession with LEGO bricks and my love for hands-on spelling."

To do this, she selected appropriately colored bricks from Aluv's impressive collection, ordering them by the system depicted in the picture above. She wrote:

"The red LEGO bricks I reserved for vowels, the smaller bricks (2 x 2) I used for short consonants, such as c, m, n, v, etc.  And the 3 x 2 LEGO bricks were for tall consonants (b, d, t, l, etc.) or consonants with a "tail" (p, q, j, etc.)."

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The next step in Becky's plan involved writing the appropriate letters on her son's Lego bricks, something she did with a fine point sharpie pen. She made a point of saying that she did this with all of the bumps facing to the right.

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Obviously, Becky was only going to need a finite number of bricks. She revealed that she made three versions of each of the vowels (that's a, e, i, o and u) and two versions of the consonants (that's everything that isn't a vowel) with the exception of the letters q, x, and l.

Once this was done, she was ready to start word building with her son!

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The first step in playing the word building game involved separating the Lego bricks into their three distinct categories: tall letters, short letters, and letters with a 'tail'.

The second was a purely practical one and involved Becky showing her son how the bricks fitted together.

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After this, she called out the following sight words and watched Aluv have fun as he made them: and, can, go, look, like, off, is, stop, the & you.

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This, however, is just one example of how lego blogs can be used to improve the language skills of young children. If you're teaching a child who is a little older, why not try out this game using the same principle to teach them all about contractions?

Now, if that isn't an ingenious way to make teaching your kid their ABCs fun, I don't know what is!