TRANSCRIPT
Learning with LEGO 
5-18-26

>>Courtney: My name is Courtney Forman. I am the mentor coordinator at TSBVI Outreach. I am a TVI by trade. Welcome to Learning with LEGO. And I will let Kathi introduce herself really quick. 

>>Kathi: Yeah, I'm Kathi Garza and I'm the early childhood consultant in the Outreach department at Texas School for the Blind. And I love LEGO. Any good answers in the chat, Courtney? 

>>Courtney: Yes, a lot was using it with students but also love LEGOs ourselves. We're a LEGO family. We have a big Kathi Garza fan, I saw. 

>>Kathi: That's funny. 

>>Courtney: My favorite was just piecing things together. 

>>Kathi: Touche! Man, I should have used that one in here. I used a lot of good LEGO puns but I should have used that one. Brick by brick we're building our knowledge. Cool. 

>>Courtney: Yes. Lots of both. Using it in our field and LEGO lovers ourselves. That's how Kathi and I came together to do this presentation. And today what we're going to talk about in regarding to using LEGOs with our students. We're going to talk about curriculum connections, educational connections and how we can use LEGOs to build up the ECC. We'll get into accessibility features, ideas, and accessing LEGO. 

>>Kathi: When we do this again, we are going to call the third bullet: Piecing together. Access to LEGO. 

>>Courtney: Shout out to Tyler. 

>>Kathi: We're going to send them their royalties. All right. I'm going to start off by talking about some curriculum connections. Courtney and I are going to bounce off of each other. As Kaycee said, if you have questions or comments or clarifications, please put that in the chat. So on this slide, we have a picture of a large LEGO sculpture from LEGOland and it's of a person wearing sunglasses, carrying a cane, and walking with a guide dog. I love that so much. We're going to start with LEGO in math because I think LEGO just naturally lends itself to so many different math concepts. And so on the screen we have a picture of some of the Braille bricks that LEGO created and that APH offers for free to students with visual impairments that are kind of numbers and math symbols. We'll talk about number sense, building concepts in number sense, comparing numbers, patterns, graphing, measurement, and fractions. We're going to do a deeper dive here in a bit. 

>>Courtney: I also want to take a moment to say in the handout there will be resources. There will be descriptions of all of these things that we talk about today. But you can really find a lot in the resources that we gathered. So when you get a spare moment over the summer, check those out. There's some really fun stuff in there. In regards to number sense, we have a few images here with some ideas for that. The first image is three pieces of paper. One with a large number 1 on it. The next with a number 2 on it. The next with a 3 on it. And it shows a little toddler placing one of the bigger Duplo box LEGOs. That's getting into sorting, number identification, counting, and all of that for our little ones in ECI or early childhood settings. Then we have a few different images here with number sense with your basic math functions of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It shows you can really use LEGOs in a variety of ways to work on these early math skills and number sense skills. For example, in the subtraction one it has one big LEGO minus a -- like a one eight-dot LEGO minus one four-dot LEGO and it equals one four-dot LEGO. If they have good tactile discrimination, you can have kiddos count the raised bumps on top of the LEGO brick and the next one to do a subtraction problem, multiplication problem, whatever it may be. Or if they're still developing that, you can do it just as pieces where they're not discriminating the bumps on top. So underneath that is a similar example where it says four -- or it has four little LEGOs. Don't mind however many dots on there -- minus three little LEGOs and it equals 1. As long as you stay consistent with that expectation, you can do this in a variety of ways, variety of levels. 

>>Kathi: Yeah, also just to note, as we kind of get started here, I want to be clear that all of these pictures that we put in here were created or designed to ensure that you guys could see and understand what we were talking about. So obviously when you're working with your students, you would accommodate for whatever their needs are. You know, I know that we've used a lot of print here and we've used LEGOs of different colors or same colors strategically so the pictures would be visible to you guys. But with students you may want to use things like a base plate to fix the LEGOs to it so they're not moving. Or you may add Braille numbers or Braille operation signs rather than print, et cetera. Is that it for this one, Courtney? 

>>Courtney: Yes. 

>>Kathi: We also have comparing numbers. I love this. So what I love about this, the first picture that we have is these were used with mega blocks so they're larger than Duplos. And we have a couple of index cards with greater than, less than, or equal sign on them. And we have a couple of little expressions set out here. The first one is a 1x4 brick. It just has four studs. It's equal to two 1x2 bricks. Which I love. You could just use another 1x4 brick but this answer would also be correct. So I like that problem-solving aspect of it, or that creative thinking. And then in the middle we have a greater than problem where there's four bricks and that's greater than the one brick on the right-hand side of the greater than sign. In the last picture we have a little hand answering the question that was set up. So there's one brick on the left and then a less than sign is comparing to the three bricks on the right. And so this is super fun. I've also done this with students in one of those APH work play trays where you have the divider that you can insert. And on the raised line of the divider we put Velcro and we had laminated tactile -- I think we either used hot glue or WikiSticks but they were cards that were greater than, less than, or equal. They could build their own and challenge each other or they could just answer things we put out there. That was really fun to do with kids. I like the work-play tray because it keeps it all contained. 

>>Courtney: And so again, we have those larger blocks that show different patterns. So we're talking, you know, ECI, early learners can do this to talk about colors. Even some of those science concepts that tie in with math. Colors, physical attributes. Creating patterns sort of things. So in the first picture we have 1x4 blocks in blue and yellow in an A, A, B pattern. More maybe next-level pattern for once they've got the concept of the typical ABAB pattern, which is shown below with purple single-dot block alternating with a 1x2 green block. So it's not only alternating number of dots on the block but also color. And to the right, we have an image of a kiddo that was building with these blocks and just in the way he was building with the colors and the type of blocks he was using, kind of ended up creating this structure that was a pattern. In the front he had all single reds. And then on top of this base he had created a 1x4 yellow. And next to the red was four single kind of hooded-shaped orange ones. And then long sloping light blue ones. In his creation, after we talked about patterns, he started creating a building that had patterns within it. Don't even get me going on how we can start introducing architecture and stuff to build on these skills as they grow older. Like Kathi was saying earlier, these are just ideas and you guys can adapt them for the learning media needs for your students and varying it at different levels. Also as you're going through this, be thinking about something Kathi and I talked about we've both done too. A lot of these are great fine motor tactile warmups for kiddos at all stages. So that's something to keep in mind, even if it may not be your main lesson, it's a great warmup for tactile activities or Braille learning. 

>>Kathi: Or a transition. Like just a fun little mini activity between, you know, because sometimes that Braille reading or working those math problems and having the cumbersome worksheet. It's nice to have something in between to take a little break. But it's actually an instructional break rather than just, you know, going and doing something that is kind of like not as relevant to the content. We also did a slide on graphing. This is a template that I made on Piof paper. You could create a graph template and there's so many different ways you can do graphing with LEGOs but this is just a very, very simple one where I just had different LEGOs. LEGO pieces that not only were different colors, but they also were different -- they had different numbers of studs on them and they were different shapes. So that it wouldn't be super confusing from a tactile perspective -- or visual, if your student is looking at that. But so then you have just a bowl of pieces and the idea is that the student would pick pieces out and, you know, put them in the graph and then you could have questions that would allow them to analyze the data that they're getting in the graph. And the nice thing about this is that you could do this at a variety of different levels because you could make the pieces more similar where they really are having to discriminate. You could also -- this also leads into talking about probability and statistics. You know, based on the information in the graph of how many of each piece that you got, what's the chance that you would pick a blah, blah, blah piece next? Or whatever. So this is really cool. And this also mimics a lot of the worksheets I have seen in those early classrooms, like kinder, first, and second where they have a worksheet that has a picture of a garden with four different kinds of bugs pictured in the garden. And the kids are supposed to document how many bees there are. How many ladybugs, how many ants. That's not super accessible for our students. But something like this would be the same concept with manipulatives that, you know, they could recreate. That might be a nice learning station or center adaptation. 

>>Courtney: Similarly, you can do a lot of those early learning activities that we see in those K-2 classrooms, especially, regarding measurement. So these next examples were about that where you see, in those early grades and classrooms start talking about estimating or non-standard units of measurement, to kind of introduce that concept. And so here we had some examples of like a roll of toilet paper, the inner tube standing up tall. And next to it are 10 LEGOs stacked up to show the equal measurement. And then to the right we have a pen lying down. And with LEGOs and interestingly enough, since I know the behind the scenes of creating this image, was originally the LEGOs, how they're shown in the picture is stacked tall-wise, lined up along the pen. So there's 9. Quite a few LEGOs to show the estimated length. So by 2, basically. Because it's 2x4 bricks. Originally, they were laid more sideways, horizontally with the 4-dot length along the pen and it didn't equal out. It went too far or too short to show the measurement of the pen. Again, that's also a problem-solving activity. A trial and error activity for our little ones to be like how else could you measure it? Would you have to use a different tool or could you use the LEGOs in a different way? Stacking them versus laying them alongside each other. All of these different conversations that we can have that are math concepts. We're also building language. We're also building these problem-solving concepts and these different topics. All in one little warmup activity or in one more accessible activity for our students versus, you know, the worksheets that we see commonly in the classroom. 

>>Kathi: Basically, I'm typing and I wanted to have an even number without having to dig through all my LEGOs for different pieces. In this slide we talk about how LEGOs can be used to represent fractions. And normally I would want to use all the same -- like if I'm representing a different fraction, I would use the same color for that. I didn't here because I wanted you guys to see the difference. In the first picture, I have a really small base plate. I think it's a 4x12. So I have a 2x4 brick, an 8-stud brick, a 4-stud brick, 2-stud brick, and a 1-stud brick just to show that you can represent fractions like you have one whole, one-half, one-fourth and then one-eighth of that brick. And I have the same thing next to it with a 6-stud brick. It's a 2x3. In this one I used the longer brick. I used a 1x3, a 1x2, and a 1 brick to show one whole, one-half, one-third, and one-sixth. Those are small examples but on the right side there's a 2x16 tall. And then I show the two 2x8s would be one-half. The 4-stud bricks are one-fourth. And there's two stud bricks for one-eighth. And then two stud bricks for one-sixteenth. You can practice building them on top of each other. In this picture they're lined up next to each other just so you can see it better. You could also with students actually build them up vertically so that you're really solidifying that concept that this quantity is the same, even though we use two 8-stud bricks to make the 16, it's still the same number so then you're starting to think about quantity and volume and conservation of matter, all that kind of stuff. And so that's also really fun to do with kids to work on fractions. 

>>Courtney: Before we move on to literacy, did anyone have any questions related to some of the math concept examples we have? Feel free to put them in the chat and we're happy to answer as we go. Or, if you're thinking of those, we're going to talk about LEGO and literacy next and we have a couple of images of Braille bricks. Please put in the chat if you're using Braille bricks. We're really curious if you have any thoughts on pros or cons with them. Kathi and I have both used them and they have their, you know, their pros and cons to each of us as well. We're real curious, if you have heard of Braille bricks, if you're using them in your instruction. And we'll talk a little bit about them in a minute as well. But we would love to hear from y'all. We'll also talk about letter identification and building words. And I see "I love Braille bricks" from Ben. Morning warmups. Yes. I have used them that way as well. 

>>Kathi: Do you want me to go or are you still reading the chat? I couldn't tell. 

>>Courtney: I was just going to take a second. 

>>Kathi: On this side we have pictures of the Braille bricks, different letters and just to show you what they are, if you haven't worked with them before. 

>>Courtney: I've used Braille bricks with many students for free choice time. I have had a kid use them to help them with spelling words. Yep. Awesome. Thank y'all for sharing. Feel free to keep doing so. Or if you have questions, just put them in the chat. Go ahead, Kathi, if you would like to go to the next one. 

>>Kathi: Okay. So for letters and words, there's two pictures on here. I created some -- Courtney and I wanted to put the Braille brick stuff in here so we just created a couple of words, like CBC words using Braille bricks. In the middle there's a picture of how you can use just regular LEGO pieces that you have in a bulk buy or whatever, to kind of make your own Braille bricks as well. And so what I've done is I took -- these are actually called tiles. If you're searching on the LEGO website. So they're not bricks, I call them the flat-y pieces but they're technically called tiles. What I did was on the bottom of the picture, I took a couple of 6-stud tiles and I used little 1-studs to put on top of them. And I made the word "and." And the reason why I just used the 6-stud tiles is they were going to be fixed to the base plate so they weren't going to be moving. And then above that, I have four different 8-stud tiles or plates -- I guess they call them plates. And then I have -- I built, out of the studs I built the letter H, B, S, and L so that you could work on word families with students and how does it change the word once you put that letter in front of "and." And so what I wanted to show you about this is that I think these 8 studs are a little more common than the 6-stud pieces. What I did was took a 1x22 piece, whether it has the stripes, it's smooth, or two pieces together. I put those on the bottom for orientation purposes so that the student would know whatever they're feeling on the bottom, that's not a stud sticking up. It is the bottom of the cell. That's the one thing about the Braille bricks that I find a little bit challenging with students is that, you know, the orientation aspect of that and which way is right-side up and whatever. Those take a lot longer to make than Braille bricks and you're limited to what studs you have, but you can go on the pick a brick website and buy hundreds of these studs for next to nothing. And so you could create your own set or customize or let your kids customize, and it's kind of fun that way too. 

>>Courtney: If you didn't know -- I was just going to say -- with the Braille bricks, you can request those on APH. That's in the handout. So go ahead and check out that link. They have tons of different activity ideas, lesson plans, and stuff like that. They even have some I learned about later after having Braille bricks, that are warmup activity. Even if we don't have, necessarily like our full reading skills yet. Like maybe we're not doing words yet and we're just working on letters, letter identification. They have some great warmups to tactile warmup or hands or activities while still being functional at different levels. All right. Now we're going to talk about LEGOs and science. There's lots of really cool things. I'm sure y'all can imagine doing with LEGOs. Like sorting activities, creative construction, engineering and design. And then there's some LEGO-specific things we'll talk about such as LEGO education and LEGO smart play. And we have an image here of LEGO education science kit, which we'll talk a little bit more about. But it has some booklets, like your typical LEGO box booklets that they provide with you. And then a bucket -- a sorted tray with some blue LEGOs, brown LEGOs, white, pink and orange LEGOs kind of sorted to get you started. 

>>Kathi: Go ahead, Courtney. 

>>Courtney: So we have some examples for some different science-type activities you could do at different levels with your kiddos, based on their development and needs. Again, as a lesson or as a fun break activity or warmup activity. In the top left we have a little girl sitting on the floor with a red piece of construction paper. Green and yellow piece of construction paper. And a blue piece of construction paper. And then some Duplo blocks. She has sorted the Duplo blocks by color. There's a few red ones on the red piece of construction paper. Big group of green ones on the green piece. So on and so forth. So again, this is an activity too that's easily accessible for a lot of families too for early childhood. Real easy to bring some construction paper, if they already have Duplo blocks. Or you can bring some -- it's not going to take up a bunch of space in an early childhood classroom or in a family's home. We're not taking over the living room, sort of thing. It's a great activity to do with siblings or peers as well. As are pretty much any of these with the LEGOs, which is another reason we love it. And then underneath that picture on the left-hand side, we have a Duplo building table with some different Duplos scattered across it. It looks like train or car ones. But instead of driving them, this kiddo is trying to stack them and they're falling down. It looks like some experimental play, finding out what will happen if the wheels is put on a stack. In the center we have a kiddo that's just doing creative play. There's tons of LEGOs out on the table, little pieces. Obviously, when you're doing LEGOs with littles, please use your discretion for choking hazards, asterisk there. We trust your discretion with that. But this is an older kiddo that has a lot of little LEGOs with little LEGO people all throughout. And he's doing some creative play with them. 

>>Kathi: The last two pictures on the slide, I did a lesson in a summer program where I portioned out the LEGOs into little baggies and the kids worked on using listening skills. What we built was a catapult. After everybody had built their little -- this is a very simple catapult. There are so many different ideas for more complex. But this one was really simple. So this is very much a science concept and we had different things like M&M's and marshmallows and a variety of things they were able to practice launching in the catapult and see which things went farther or what would happen if you moved the fulcrum or whatever, if you moved the wheels closer to the basket or further away from the basket. We had a really fun time experimenting and seeing about that. And so that's what those pictures kind of are on the right. And there's a little guy who's looking up close as he's lining up his pieces. 

>>Courtney: And again -- you're good, Kathi. I was just going to say Kathi and I are really into and we kind of geek out on finding activities that can kind of follow through development, sort of things. Even with those, you know, early sorting activities, that will, in science, lead to talking about characteristics, length, height, stacking, physics of what happens when it knocks over. Or if something is not balanced, it doesn't have the right center of mass. LEGOs is a great way to introduce concepts early and continue to use them throughout child or even later into development to talk about these science and math-related concepts and give that language and give a tangible way to explore those things 

>>Kathi: This slide I'm going to go through quickly because I see we're about halfway through. So the LEGO education is kind of a new program that was recently launched on the LEGO website. You can actually order those kits that were pictured on the LEGO and science slide. And they have them for different age levels. Grades 2 to 5 or 5 to 7 or whatever. You can order whatever you want. On the slide, pictured on the slide are just examples of some of the things that you can find on the website. They're literally just screenshots. So there's like -- it tells you what the theme is. And so this lesson was Beach House Builder. How can you keep a house by the ocean safe? It's teaching about like erosion and problem solving. And so then it also gives you kind of your three objectives. Like I can compare solutions. I can use a model. And I can explain how water can change the land. And you can also, on the site, when you order the kits, you have all the lesson plan and everything. But you can also get the evaluation rubric and you can look at skills and prerequisite knowledge needed so you can tailor them. It's a hands-on way -- we do a lot of filling in of concept development or maybe pre-teaching some of the content that's coming to make sure our kids have the concepts to understand it. This is a really good way to be able to do that for your students, even if the class is not doing this lesson themselves. Since I know you all have so much extra time when you're not working on your own goals and objectives that you can do this stuff, but at least it's fun. 

>>Courtney: Then there's LEGO SMART play, which is very, very new. I have not gotten to use these yet but I am very excited about them. They have smart bricks that react to different programming you give it on how you move. They have different ways you can do twists, taps, and stuff like that. Similarly, the SMART tags. It keeps it kind of engaging and a kiddo can tell the SMART bricks or SMART tags, as they call them. How to behave. Should it sound like a car? A helicopter? A toilet? If you have had certain LEGOs, you know there's all sorts of different characters in these sets so you never know and kiddos can kind of explore that. Along with that, the SMART minifigures that help bring stories to life, they talk about. It plays different sounds, they have different moods or reactions for smart encounters between these minifigures. 

>>Kathi: Let me tell you the controversy over these things in the adult fans of LEGOs is crazy. Like, people have very strong opinions about whether or not this is cool or whether or not this is like just defeating the whole foundation of LEGOs. I enjoy reading that stuff, those armchair keyboard warriors. I get a kick out of that. I don't have any yet. Most of them that I have seen are not in sets that I'm interested in, like Star Wars and things like that. But we'll see. Maybe I'll get a set with some at some point. So we're going to talk about how to build up the ECC with LEGOs. We have a picture here of a giant LEGO sculpture from LEGOland and it's a woman on roller skates and she's carrying food trays all made out of LEGOs. So the first slide -- full disclosure. I am not a COMS. Courtney, you are not a COMS either, correct? 

>>Courtney: I am not. 

>>Kathi: We're going to talk about building concepts in O&M. On this slide are some pictures of different maps, and we'll also talk about how to develop positional concepts. I know there are things about these maps that are not O&M -- they don't fulfill all of those O&M requirements. But they're just examples. I know that I don't have like a north point, north, south, east, and west. And some of them are a little cluttered, depending on the age of your students. Anyway, but I had a blast making them, just so you are aware. The picture on the left is a map of a classroom. You have cubbies. There's some LEGOs that indicate where to line up, tables, rug, and a library center. Just kind of a basic kind of elementary classroom. There's also a picture of just a route from the classroom to the cafeteria using LEGO bricks to kind of show the route that you'll have a left turn and then a right turn to get to the cafeteria and kind of the layout of the cafeteria. Then I created one, mostly because in my personal life, I always struggle with this. I created one that's kind of like an intersection with two bus stops. I used like the window pieces to create a bus stop. And I also had some really cool flags that I just randomly bought pieces for and I wanted to use those. I used those to depict where the crosswalk poles are, because sometimes that's hard to find. I had fun doing that. Whether or not it's super functional, I don't know. The last picture was just a funny thing because I had this LEGO lattice, garden lattice thing and it fell off the ledge it was on and broke into some pieces. And I was having to figure out -- I was having to use all my best positional concepts to put it back together. You know, failure is feedback, right? You drop it and then you have to use your skills to rebuild it back together. 

>>Courtney: And then more with our ECC skills is stacking up our sensory skills. Again, we have talked a lot about LEGOs are great for tactile discrimination. And then this picture -- there's three pictures and the far right picture we have a kiddo that has a few small LEGOs on a tray. And he's feeling them and manipulating them with his hands on the LEGOs in the tray. But they're also good for working on developing listening skills as well. On the far left, we have a picture of a tall cylinder container. 

>>Kathi: It's plastic. Like those vase things. 

>>Courtney: Filled with LEGOs. Right next to it is a small plastic water bottle, like your typical drinking bottle, also filled with LEGOs. Shake them up, do they sound different? Similarly, you can put some in metal bowls, some in plastic bowls. How do they sound different? Two LEGOs versus 20 LEGOs in a container. All that sort of stuff. And then in the middle there's a kit that is for building LEGO fidget spinners. That's another way to build that tactile discrimination. But when it spins, it also makes sounds. Can you do different things to it to change the tactile properties of it? The sound qualities of it? Again, all of these different exploration things to build those sensory skills. 

>>Kathi: Yeah. And the way that we did this lesson, it was by listening. So they dumped all their pieces in their tray. And then I would tell them what piece they needed to find. And so it was trying to build that listening comprehension. And so they could build something. And then I also allowed them to see what else could you build with these bricks or what else might you want to try. So it was really fun. These pictures on this slide are talking more about tactile discrimination. How you could give groups of LEGO pieces to your students and have them determine which one is different. And so and it varies in complexity. Some of the pictures on this slide it's really obvious what the difference is and others it might be -- I kind of have them in order thinking about complexity. But some of the pieces are the same size but one has a slant on it. Or one has brick texture on the side of it. Or, you know, some of them have, like, other textures. They're beveled or whatever. It's just a way to kind of test those tactile discrimination skills in your kids. 

>>Courtney: All right. And of course LEGOs -- and we talked about it with some of you at the beginning saying that we're a LEGO family or I've been using LEGOs since I was a little kid. Rec and leisure. We have a few pictures here. One of a kiddo lying on a bench with a bunch of little LEGOs stacked together building some sort of creation. And the bench is surrounding basically a LEGO pit that he's next to. Just full of thousands of LEGOs. Doing some creative building. And then the picture to the right of that, in the very middle, is one of the art series ones, LEGOs. This one is Van Gogh's Starry Night at various phases of construction. First the LEGOs all organized, set out in pieces, colors, and sets. So they're easier to find, because there's lots of pieces to some of these. They can be real complex. So that's even getting with our older kiddos, teenagers, adults, us. And then it shows the progression of building this piece. And then on the far right is a picture of a kiddo looking at a box of LEGOs. Looking at the price tag of it. Looking at the name of it up close. You can see a huge variety of LEGOs kind of in the background. So shopping for LEGOs, right? That's part of fueling the things we like to do. 

>>Kathi: Yeah. I'm all about shopping for rec and leisure. 

>>Courtney: Go ahead, Kathi. 

>>Kathi: This is just a little funny slide. This career concepts. Let me tell you, LEGO is a very expensive hobby and so, you know, there's always getting creative about how you're going to fund your LEGO addiction. Organization and clean up is very important. And then, you know, you can talk about job duties a little bit here. This is kind of silly. One of these pictures is a dog laying upside down in his bed just looking at all of the mess of LEGOs on the floor. I imagined him or her saying that's not my job. I'm not picking that up. Then there's a little guy in the middle picture who is purchasing, making a LEGO purchase using his mom's credit card. And then the picture on the right is actually of our playroom at one point where my son had dumped his entire bucket of bulk LEGO all over the floor and picked out pieces to different zones where he was creating different things. And I wondered if I was ever going to get all those pieces out of the carpet. I just said just keep them down there because if I step on them they're going in the trash. 

>>Courtney: And again, so this is great concept development for career education, rec and leisure through development. Early ages. It might be your job to clean up with your siblings and make sure they're stacked away neatly. Or where are we going to keep this if we buy more LEGOs? That's my current dilemma with my own child. 

>>Kathi: That's my dilemma. Where am I going to display it after I build it? 

>>Courtney: And throughout the life span we can talk about budgeting, saving, sticking within a budget. That's hard sometimes when it's the things you love so much. Earning money, all of those go into those ECC concepts. And also make it fun and rewarding. 

>>Kathi: I could go on and on about this saving and stuff because the LEGO website does not make it easy. They have monthly gift with purchases. And you only get that item -- they don't sell it in stores. You only get it if you purchase X amount of money and then you have to wait until people start listing it on Ebay if you don't get it in that window. I paid like 30 bucks each for these dioramas of different biomes, like the rainforest and desert. If I would have bought them with purchases it would have been $600. So it's all that negotiating that happens. This is you, Courtney. 

>>Courtney: Oh, okay. 

>>Kathi: Right? 

>>Kathi: No. You want me to do it? I did this one. Sorry. 

>>Courtney: It doesn't matter. We can do whatever. But LEGO is great for self-determination too and self-restraint, like Kathi was just referring to. 

>>Kathi: Or lack thereof. 

>>Courtney: Yes. But I mean, it's one of the ultimate creation activities, right? You can just create anything that you want to, anything that you're interested in. Or you can share your different -- it's a great opportunity to socialize and share your likes and dislikes. You know, we have a kiddo -- actually, Kathi, I'm going to let you talk about the left one. The middle one is a set of LEGOs, which are one of the floral ones. I love the floral ones and they're expanding their different kinds of LEGO sets to meet different likes and dislikes. Earlier we were talking about the different architecture ones or the different art ones. So you can have these different likes and be able to choose what you like. On the right there is a picture of a kiddo, my kiddo. He loves all things trucks and construction. Still does. And so he would have to navigate one, budgeting, but two, telling people what do you want for your birthday or which ones do you like? Saying I like the construction ones. I don't like the animal ones. That sort of stuff. It's even self-determination with LEGOs. We can meet all the areas of the ECC. I'll let Kathi talk about the picture on the left. 

>>Kathi: The picture on the left is my little guy and he had just built a Star Wars creation -- or a Star Wars kit that his dad had given him. He was really excited and proud of that. That he had built it and that you could move it around and make it work. I want to share too about this one in the middle. This is actually some flowers that I created for somebody who really likes del Phinium. I have low vision and you think I would be over this ECC stuff. I had to do research on which LEGOs looked the most similar to the flowers and I took the pieces that I needed and went to the LEGO website and I had to navigate the site to order different pieces in different colors so I could make them look different. Order it, pay for it, receive it, and figure out how to build them. It was a really cool project that was, you know, where I had to work through all of the areas of budgeting and assistive technology and all that to kind of make that happen. Is this me, Courtney? 

>>Courtney: The last one, yes. 

>>Kathi: Accessing LEGO. Here's a picture of another large LEGO sculpture of a LEGO person using a wheelchair and has a big magnifying glass. And tools and strategies. So you can use -- practice different tools and strategies for accessing LEGO. There's a picture on this slide of a little guy using a cell phone to enlarge the instruction booklet. There's another student who's using a tray to be able to keep all of his pieces in, you know, in a good location where he can find them. And then you can also use just little food divided plates to sort your pieces as you open the bags of your LEGO. And so that you can sort them by color or you can sort them by type or however you want so that it makes building it easier because you know exactly where the pieces are as you need them. Or if you have low vision, it's like, oh, I know I'm looking for a blue piece. I typically don't sort mine because if I sort them by color, I'm looking for a green piece but there are so many green pieces, how do I find the one with only one stud or two studs. I kind of keep them in the bag and do it that way. Oh, I'm looking for a red piece, whatever. But you can do that. And there's a lot of -- you can buy commercial things to sort your LEGOs but you can also just have random little plates are nice too. As you can see with the little guy, he's using a paper plate where he's emptying, as like a tray to keep his pieces organized. I do that all the time. Paper bowls work really well also because they don't, you know, they keep it even more contained. 

>>Courtney: We wanted to share briefly on LEGO 4 +. We believe they used to be called LEGO Jr. but it's the in between from your typical LEGO, from Duplos, the bigger pieces. This is an in between where you have the smaller pieces for like the cars or some of the bases, they're already built. They already are a base and you build on top of those. That's a great one that has bigger pieces. They're usually very high contrast because they're geared towards kind of that younger age, but anyone can use them. And the instructions have those step by steps, of course, but with those bigger pieces it's a little easier to follow along. 

>>Kathi: I have two co-workers, who I'm not going to put on blast. If they want to identify themselves in the chat, they can. But I have two co-workers I like to argue with about whether or not LEGO is fun or stressful. I'm thinking maybe they need to go back to the 4 + sets so that they can build their capacity of LEGO-building skills so that the other sets will be a little bit easier. I also am kind of -- I'm a little bit of a snob. I prefer the LEGO brand because I have built brick sets that are not LEGO brand and the instructions are oftentimes a lot harder for me to read and interpret. There's that. These are nice because if you have kids who are, you know, even if they're older, 6, 7, 8 years old then they can at least kind of start learning the process and how the instruction books, you know, depict the steps and all that stuff using these sets that are a little bit easier. 

>>Courtney: I will say a lot of the 4 + sets too are a lot of really fun concepts, rec and leisure concepts. This one looks like camping or a theme park or something. 

>>Kathi: Yeah, it's Toy Story. 

>>Courtney: They tie a lot to different ECC areas that are good conversation starters as well. 

>>Kathi: And then -- see, we ended up perfectly because you wanted me to do this one. I have been waiting the whole slide show to talk about this. This is -- when I became a single parent and I had a little boy, I was worried that what am I going to do when he wants to build LEGOs and how am I going to be able to see this stuff? Now, he does not like LEGO but I do so now I build. But I started using the LEGO Builder app. Not every set has digital instructions in the LEGO Builder app. When I build the Starry Night, that's one of the reasons all those pieces were sorted. There were five different colors of blue and I had to use the book, which had a gray background. I did that mostly so I could make sure I was using the correct color and the correct place. That was super hard. But in the LEGO Builder app it will give you the digital instructions and so you can see in some of these pictures that are more the full screen, on the left side. You can expand that out in the app. On the left side it will have like the pieces you need. And then in the middle it tells you kind of how to place the piece and position the piece. What's really cool -- so in the middle picture it's kind of showing you how the current pieces that you're working with will have a little bit of an outline so that you know kind of you are going to put the 1x2 in this position and the 1x1 in this position, rather than reversed. And so it kind of shows you that little outline. But what I love about this is that -- like in this bottom picture you can actually zoom in and you can rotate, like completely 360-degree, 3D rotate this to be able to count how many studs are between whatever pieces you're supposed to be layering. Because sometimes there's a lot of layering in LEGO. And so sometimes I struggle to find like where exactly -- which exact stud does this go on. And I can rotate the picture or zoom in or move it over and completely do a complete rotation as if I was rotating the actual physical model. That was such a game changer to be able to making this a lot more fun. And so you can scan the QR code on the instruction booklet or search for the set in the app. There's a lot of other stuff you can do. You can do like community builds, like building parties where you're all building the same set together. But I mostly use it for the instructions and I really prefer that to using the books. Because it's easier for me to see that. To be clear, I don't know how this plays with JAWS -- not JAWS, VoiceOver. I would be really curious to try that some time. If anybody ever tries it out and wants to e-mail me and let me know what it's like. I'm very curious about that. I don't use VoiceOver and I have never tried VoiceOver on this app. And that's all. Right, Courtney? 

>>Courtney: That's it. If anyone has any aha moments or questions, feel free. Kathi and I are happy to listen or to answer any questions you may have. Or if you end up doing any of these, we would love to hear about it. Feel free to share.