Category: Lego

Lego Pulleys and Levers

2/5/2016

Levers, pulleys, gears, axles and other such things. These have been consuming our science-y lives lately.

This week we decided to put this learning to the test to see if we could build
1. a crane
2. a tow truck.

It was fun. :)

My son built this crane.

I put it to him as a challenge.

He tried it out several times before he was able to make one strong enough to lift the weight of one lego car.

He came up with this question that I couldn't answer, perhaps one of my readers can.

WHY does it get harder for the crane to lift the higher up it lifts an object?

I did tell him that it had something to do with gravity but I couldn't fully explain it to him.

This particular beauty was harder to build than I expected. Like my son I had a couple of false starts, but eventually I got it to work. The hardest part was figuring out how to get the string to wind around the pulley (and it still never worked perfectly) but at least it was able to exert pressure on the car and pull it forward (ergo a success).

We been using the God's design Curriculum for our learning, but if you don't have that curriculum here are some places you can go for additional help.

PDF on simple machines.
Easier to lift submerged items.

Unit Studies from
Oklahoma. EHO.
Hot Chalk. Our Journey Westward.

For information on doing Lego check out this link: http://brickdave.com/how-to-learn-with-lego

I have linked up here.

Our Home for Lego - yes, it's organized! :)

1/23/2016

As a child I loved to play with lego. So many pictures were taken of me playing with lego.     But I hated tye searching through a bin and trying to find the little pieces that I needed.     It seemed to take forever and I just wanted to be able to build and play.

I have to admit it.. I am STILL that way.   :)

So I have a boy who likes playing with lego.   Building things and playing with them.   I like playing with him.   But since I am older now... I can choose NOT to fight with lego pieces so I decided I would organize them.

I used to have all the lego in one bin and thought I was kinda stuck with that, then one day I ran across the blog of a lady who put her lego into clear totes and had all her little stuff divided into a smaller version of these plastic shelf/bins. I said to myself...OOH!!!! I Could do that.

I promptly went out and bought three of these and then the next week got a fourth (what can I say we have a LOT of lego). Did you know I have a dream to build a lego town? It would be SO much fun to do so, and then to have a train track running around it... ah... some day! :)

So how does it work for us?

The largest bins hold the larger items... which we have divided by type. 1's, 2's, flat etc each have their own bin.

We have a bin for the odd ball pieces and a bin for mini figures and their gear.

I made a point of putting all those little, hard to find pieces all in one bin.

Our manuals all have a bin of their own as well.

We have a few meccano pieces as well. Some we got free, others I got cheap. My lad is not highly impressed with them but is reluctant to give them away, so stored they are in a smaller shelf.

Try as I might, I could not figure out how to put our K'nex into the bins as well. I used to be able to before we were gifted with a large amount, so they now have a bin of their own.

We used to have our lego set up on the main floor of the house, and have since moved it upstairs to the book room. To that end my lad had to pack up all his creations and they are currently waiting to be unpacked. Normally we have a white shelf sitting on top of the bin/shelves for his creations to sit on.

It makes it so much easier to add lego to our schooling.days, which of course makes the learning go SO much easier indeed. :) Check out our day here. :)

So tell me.... how do you organize the lego in our house??? I'm curious to know how others do it.

Castles and Pirates in Newfoundland!

1/8/2016

Continuing our studies of Canada, I thought it would be fun to work with lego today since I had found a neat castle/pirate/water/land thingey on sale after Christmas. :) I wanted to make it just needed to find a way to tie it all together. So I did some research this morning... did Newfoundland have castles? Did they ever have pirates?
THEY DID!!! WOOT WOOT!!! Lego fun here we come!!!

BUT first the learning.
Newfoundland has had a few pirates but the best known of them is Peter Easton.   Depending on the Youtube video you want he's in the top 15 of the worst pirates.

Peter Easton was a man who started out his life working a commission for the Queen of England. His job... Take three battle ships and patrol the coast of the world.   Easy enough, did his job. WHILE he was doing this job a new king (James I) came into power.   The war with Spain ended, England, with no battles to fight, decreased it's military might leaving Peter Easton and his men stranded. No pay, no way home.   What to do, what to do?

AH HA!!!   Piracy!   Therein lies the answer.   And he was awfully good at it to, for within seven years he was known as the "Notorious Pirate". In 1610 he was the wealthiest, most feared pirate in the Western Hemisphere.    5,000 men plus 40 ships.

He fortified Harbour Grace Bay and there is still an Island named after him.

click image to go to source tide maps

He even took the King's emissary hostage trying to convince him to become a pirate. But Whiteboure refused, offering to petition King James for a pardon for the pirate, in order to be released. The pardon came, but Easton never received it, even though he waited two years for it to come. Growing tired of waiting he set off to fight for the King of Algiers, fighting a profitable war against Spain.

He eventually retired, married and settled down. He was known in the end as the Marquis of Savoy.

Since we were learning about pirates we played a pirate game called Black Spot. At least some people think it was started by the pirates. It's as logic/patterning game where your goal is to get the other person to take the dark stone. Rules are simple. Alternate who starts. One dark stone, 10 light stones. You can can 1, 2 or 3 stones away at a time. My 10 year old quickly figured out the trick to winning this game.

So Peter Easton has fortified Harbour Grace Bay and Ferryland. Building himself a beautiful home and protected area.

This led us into the story of the Castle built ... well. at what is now often called Castle Hill. :) Built on a site now call Placentia, Castle Hill is a walk back in time. King Henry XIV wanted to establish a strong base for New France, so he built a Castle hill to be a base of operations.

Though it gradually lost influence against St. John's, particularly once the British were able to successfully blockade and defeat it, this place was the base of operations for d’Iberville and his devastating attacks against the English Settlements.

As we looked for castles on youtube my son was delighted to find this minecraft video that use Easton's name in it. He kept saying "well done but mom, they must be using a different tone/skin pack. I bet I could do this if I worked hard at in creative mode".

All the learning "done" we then set to build our pirate home and castle (though it's really NOT a castle we just pretended). :) but that's what Lego is for right? We also aware that they wouldn't have had power boats at the time or automatic weapons.

After we finished our build we had fun using the different characters names that we learned about today. The British and the French fighting, Easton doing his raids, D'iberville and his attacks on the English. It was all quite exciting. :)

Sources:
Castle Hill.
Pirates of Canada.
The Pirate King.
Tide Forecast.
Castle Hill National Historic Site.

Catapult from Lego in Sequence

3/14/2014

My lad made this catapult. He gave me strict orders about what I was to put up here. In the right order mom and only the pictures I say. :) Okay lad. :) it's your creation.

climbing up to set the rope. Do you think this is a dangerous job?

wind it up tight! Be careful!

there we got it!

okay, cut the rope guy,get ready, I have to check something.

NO!!!! Don't cut the rope yet!!!!! STOP!!!!!

Ouch! That hurt! Stupid cut the rope Guy!!!! OUCH!

MY ADDITIONS
Throughout the process of making a catapult the lad has learned much about catapults and how dangerous it was to make them. This of course, makes it really fun to enact out these scenes. :) Good communication and attention to detail was really important when making a catapult! :)

The lad had a few false tries, but in the end success! OH.. how I love the internet and how easy it is to look things up to see how things were done. :) I wish I could find the Youtube video that we thoroughly enjoyed watching.... but not to be on this rushed morning as we head off to HOPE days. Cheerio!

Reading, Constellations and more

2/26/2014

Today we got off to a late start with our schooling. I've been dealing with a headache for the past 10 days... doc tells me it's a particular type of migraine that is hard to get rid of. :) It causes dizziness which means headaches, your head ache with makes you dizzy. In time it will leave. Makes it slower getting going though.

Anyways, we read from the warriors over breakfast. The lad was able to recall facts well from previous reading we had done. Then upstairs to work on the names of Christ study that we are doing. Today we learned about Yahweh Shamma (i may have spelled that wrong). The Lord is There. The authors connected it with Immanuel... God with us which I thought was rather cool.

From there we moved on to doing Story of the World where we learned about the Grand Canal in China. Saved China (as a whole nation), cost to Sui Dynasty their leadership (high taxes, increased poverty, death, poor working conditions). I think it's amazing what they did... despite the cost to the people involved. Five million people, six years, 1200 miles I think. All of China now connected. Amazing!

Then we read from our science book and were inspired to make our own Constellation viewer. This was rather fun to do. :) We fit Reading Kingdom into the mix as well.

The lad then worked on his math ... doing it through IXL since by this time I'm running on empty and just need to lay my head down for a spell. We had lunch.... I did the easy chips and cheese thing, the lad had some pizza. We finished the day with the lad doing his 20 minutes of reading. Today his book was "Wood Frog".

All in all a nap did me a world of good afterwards and the lad had fun just relaxing with Skyrim for a while (he's learning to read some of the options on his own as well). :)

Making a Constellation Viewer

2/26/2014

The lad and I have a science book we try to read from every day. It gives snippets of information that often inspire us to pursue further. Today they were talking about sextants and needing to follow the constellations.

I recalled the activity for the Lego Club through Currclick for next month and thought to meself..... I wonder if we could make that. So as the lad sent to work on some other homeschooling I pulled together the pieces called for. Then we sat down to see if we could figure out how they made it, from the pieces given. We couldn't. So the lad was "mom, why don't we just make our own version of it?"

Sure why not. :)

Since we didn't quite make it the way they wanted us to we needed to cut down the constellation cards that came with it. We cut off about 1 brick worth. Poked holes into the cards and then the lad had a hoot looking at the constellations, asking me the name and what they were supposed to stand for and then saying "Mom, to me it looks like a ____". The big dipper was the only one that he said looked like a dipper or a scoop. The Crux he said looked like a box, and the Hydrus apparently made him think of pizza.

All in all it was a fun activity. And he learned a few things as well. :)

I looked through it as well. We learned that we needed to cup our hands around the ends to block the light coming in past our eyes.

Perhaps you too could make a constellation viewer and cards? Have fun seeing what YOU see in the stars. :)

Dimensions are approximately 6 high, 12 long, 14 wide. with flats on the top and bottom.

look through side.

side view

card view side.

I linked at at the hearts for home blog hop. :)

Lego Organization

11/19/2013

In this house, we like Lego. This weekend we decided to take apart and put lego away. We do this on a regular basis. We build things, play with them, store them and eventually dismantle them in order to play again. :)

A while back... Last year I think, I saw a lego storage idea that immediately captured my interest. I didn't organize quite the same way that gal did, but my idea was based off hers. Sorry, can't remember who the gal was .. it was a while ago you know. :)

This is one thing I know we did differently. she put all the small tiny pieces together. I HATE hunting for specialty pieces so I repurposed some sewing/fishing tackle boxes.

Different types of lego go into different sectionals.

From left to right (facing the bins)
Stuff to be taken apart, instruction manual, knex, and those warrior bugs things
Second section has our bigger building blocks
Third section has plates/flats/castle sections, and miscellaneous big stuff.
Fourth section has figurines and their stuff, angle pieces, automotive pieces and speciality building pieces.

Like me.. the lad would happily subdivide all these categories even more if we had the space...but we don't have room to divide all the blues, blacks etc up. We have to jumble them as much as it bothers us. :) We can't separate it all.

In use pieces sit on top. Spiders, castles, vehicles and more. :) If it don't fit, too bad, so sad lad, can't keep it all up.