Lego®-based Therapy Resources. Inclusive TV and Podcast Episode 008
Last time, I created tools and guidance to teach about wearing masks (COVID-19) related, and I hope you and your children can understand the process, decrease their anxiety, and practice wearing masks.
In this episode, you will:
1. Watch the whole process of building the collaborative set. THE MANDALORIAN & THE CHILD
2. Find out the total timing and facilitator practicalities.
3. Find out about extension activity to this collaborative building.
Hey There,
This is the first VLOG of 2021 and I hope that this new year will be better than the old one. I’ve promised you that I will show you the whole building process of the Mandalorian and the child – collaborative set (Lego®-based Therapy Resources). So, if you are the Lego® based Therapy Facilitator, this will allow you to plan your sessions with children or adults that you support. Please consider subscribing to my channel as this will help me to create more videos like this one and if I will have 100 subscribers I will be able to choose the name for my channel.
If you are new to me, my name is Bea and I’m deeply passionate about helping children to become independent and happy adults and I’ve made it my mission to help schools/settings to create truly inclusive practice through documenting my personal experience as the Lego® based Therapy Expert and Facilitator, Autism Lead Practitioner and Creator and Funder of the Brick by Brick Academy (In-House and Online Training Hub). I believe, that each child is unique and each setting is different but one thing is certain that we all would like to help our children to thrive, from day one. Especially, now where 1 out of 4 people struggle with mental health and where children struggle with social skills and a high level of anxiety. It’s not surprising that plenty of professionals are seeking for new, positive and engaging ways to develop children social communication skills through a positive change to their setting’s culture, in a way that will benefit both (children and adults). My reasons for advocating Lego® based Therapy are simple: I saw the effectiveness of this approach and positive change in children and adults emotional and behavioural responses. Understanding individual child/person and delivering child-centred and evidence-based provision is extremely important. Especially now where children spend so much time in front of the computer and lack of social opportunities to practice communication, language and social skills. Well, I’m here to show you otherwise and inspire you to create safe, trustworthy Lego® based Therapy Interventions/approach where your children will be able to collaborate and socialise in a structured way to spend more time, to develop your children emotional/social intelligence. I’ve realised that you don’t have to make extreme changes and spend thousands of pounds to help children and improve your school provision. Sometimes, you don’t have to do something radical or expensive but you just have to be proactive. So, here is me inviting you to follow my journey in creating truly inclusive provision that helps you to support children and develop your skills. Are you ready? Let’s go!
Over Christmas, on December 26, we took part in the LegoBuildDay action to support Family Time=Build Time Action! I encouraged you to join us if you love building or if you are the Lego® based Therapy facilitator. After all, to run therapy sessions you must love playing with Lego® and know how long it will take to build the project so you can plan your sessions and predict all the possible problems with the children/adults you support. As all the people involved in the build were adults I decided that we will build The Mandalorian and the child (I’m a big fan of Star Wars!). Below, I’ve placed all the data about the project including number set, recommended age, predicted timing, reality check timing, and other useful information if you will decide to undertake this project with the children/adults that you support.
We enjoyed this project very much even though we experienced some difficulties in communicating, following another person way of thinking and sticking to the jobs (and we are adults). We never build together before and I had to play the facilitator role. We fairly allocated jobs and (as I was leading) I informed the team that we will be rotating the jobs one page of instruction. I knew that this will give us the necessary time to recover from more demanding jobs (engineer, builder). We were extremely happy with the job rotation system as being the engineer or builder was extremely difficult, even for us adults.
If you decide to undertake this fantastic project please remember that you must get through the necessary language to describe bricks (as some of them are tricky to describe). If you not sure if this is the right project for children/youngsters/adults that you support, please remember that this is appropriate for those who already get through L1 and L2 of Lego® based Therapy so I would suggest that this project is suitable for those who know the rules, can deal with building in stages, and practised describing bricks and prepositions, understand job rotation and can cope with 1h building.
Even though this collaborative set age recommendation is 10+ it can be built with younger children (if you work in primary school then I would try this with children age 8+) who are on Level 3 or Level 4 of Lego® based Therapy.
You can also split this project into 2 different one (build the Mandalorian or Grogu) as you have two different instructions. This are great as Lego®-based Therapy Resources.
As the extension of this building project (of course, the level of the extensions will depend on children/youngsters abilities) I suggest planning photo session of the finished project, then another one to create a new digital product, adding animation or converting this into the GIF. I promise you that your students will love doing this and you can teach them so many complex social skills through these activities.
Lego®-based Therapy extension activity
We all love playing with the camera showing our creative side and this is mine!
I suggest splitting this into planning and photo session and then plan another session to edit and create new graphics, videos or GIFs’.
You can use plenty of different tools and software and most of them you can download for free. You can use I-Pads, mobile phones, computers, laptops, etc.
If you have different ideas I would really appreciate your involvement in this. Please feel free to comment under the video. Although I can’t promise, I try my best to answer all the comments.
I hope you enjoyed these Lego®-based Therapy Resources. Next time, I will answer the question that plenty of Lego® based Therapy facilitators ask themselves. This question can be found all over social media.
Until the next time
Love and xxx
Bea