L4Life’s Village LEGO® Challenge

To start off term three school holidays with some fun, we challenged all the LEGO®-lovers in our L4Life Village to build something starting with the letter ‘C’. And our awesome Village community got building! 

At L4Life’s Kwiz for the Kidz in August 2019, each table was given 20 minutes to build something beginning with ‘L’ (for Learning for Life and LEGO®). The challenge proved that LEGO® is not just for kids; everyone had so much fun working with their teams, and all the builds were so great. So this year’s Village LEGO® Challenge was open to everyone, of all ages and abilities, any where.

Although ‘C’ may start the word COVID, it was chosen as this challenge’s letter-to-build-on because LEGO® can be associated with C for: Clever, Competence, Construction, Concentration, Challenge, Confidence, Co-operation, Collaboration, Connection, Communication, Conversation, Control, Calm, Creativity, Careers, Co-ordination!

We had 30 entries by 40 people in six categories; preschool, primary ages 5-8, primary ages 9-12, secondary, adult, and family. We had builders as young as three years old all the way to parents (ages unknown!). Thank you so much to all the people who got involved with our challenge; we have been so impressed with the creativity and skills of our Village! We hope you all had such fun building!

We’re so thankful to have had LEGO® Masters host and funny-man, Hamish Blake, join L4Life co-Founder and favourite, Tom Gleisner, to review all the entrants, and select a winner from each category.

Just like Hamish said, “all the entrants are amazing and are such cool builds”, so all the builders should be so proud of their creativity and construction. But Hamish had to pick a winner, so big congratulations to our LEGO® Challenge winners:

• Preschool: COUCH by Madeleine (4 y.o)
• Primary, 5-8 y.o: CRETACEOUS PARK by Harvey (8 y.o)
• Primary 9-12 y.o: CAT by Eliza (10 y.o)
• Secondary: CORRUPTER by Keller (14 y.o)
• Adult: CONTEMPORARY CARPARK COMPLEX by Hamish
• Family: CASTLE by Sadie (8 y.o), Tilly (6 y.o) and Freddie (4 y.o)

Keep the building going!

Check out the Boredom Busters challenges from LEGOLAND® Discovery Centre – they’re delivering daily challenges for kids to enjoy at home throughout the school holidays (and home-lockdown). It’s all available for free on their website and Facebook page. Boredom Busters is made up of videos, worksheets and activities to inspire kids to create, have fun and experiment with LEGO®.

A little about LEGO® and Autism:

At L4Life, we know that like other educational toys, LEGO® is good in therapy/teaching for:

• Imaginative play/problem solving/focus,
• Following instructions,
• Developing fine motor skills,
• Social skills (taking turns, sharing, collaborating),
• Skills can be generalised to childcare, school, kinder – LEGO is universal!
• It can be used to teach colours, matching, language, as a play break in between other lessons, maths/geometry, shapes/sizes,
• Building self esteem (the LEGO expert!),
• Pathway to latter subjects (robotics, coding/patterns) and careers!
• Many kids with autism like the order, control and fabulous combos LEGO allows.