- Use Lego to improve your child’s fine motor and nurture flexibility
- Practise speech and pointing through playing with Lego
When I first encouraged my autistic son to build Lego, his fingers were weak and he struggled with coordination. But as we practised over months and years he grew to love it, and now enjoys building complex constructions by himself following a manual. It is one of the few ways he can maintain concentration and focus for multiple hours on one activity.
As a parent, I discovered that building Lego together provided opportunities for practising speech and pointing. Lego is also great for learning to be flexible, to be OK when you lose a piece, which inevitably happens!
Here’s how I taught my son to play with Lego bricks.
Play with a fully built Lego toy
We started with the Lego Classic sets, which I recommend as they’re easy to build and feature things young kids like, such as animals and robots. My son liked sea creatures at the time, so we started with the whale.
First, I constructed the whale by myself and gave it to him to play with for a few days.
Deconstruct it little by little
Then one day, I handed the whale to him, but with one piece missing. ‘Oh no! Its head has fallen off’, I said, and helped him put it back on.
Just as I did when I taught him how to do buttons, I put my hands over his and guided each movement of the fingers. I taught him how to keep applying pressure on the brick until it snapped into place.
Over time, more parts of the whale would have ‘fallen off’. Each time built it back up together.
Gradually, over days and weeks, my son learned to build the whale from scratch. I found the key is to slowly increase the number of bricks to rebuild, and give plenty of hand-over-hand guidance, to avoid my son getting too frustrated and walking away.
Move on to more advanced sets
After about a year, we moved on to more advanced sets like Lego City By this point my son was into big vehicles like helicopters, planes, fire engines, ships, so he loved it.
Again, with each one, I first gave him the fully constructed version to play with, then gradually broke it down.
At this stage, I started encouraging him to follow the manual. Unlike the Lego Classic sets, the City ones are too complex to memorise entirely, so it provided an incentive for my son to look at the steps on the page. I demonstrated through verbal cues and pointing how to build one piece, turn the page, follow the instructions, and repeat.
Nurture flexibility
Once the Lego construction was built, my son would play with it for a few days. Then one night, while he slept, I would break it all up! In the morning he was frustrated to see that he had to build it back up again in order to play with it, but it encouraged him to react calmly and constructively, and focus on the task at hand.
Lego pieces are notorious for going missing. My son was — still is — furious when he is missing a piece and he can’t build a set exactly as the manual says. But, by gradually learning to use an alternative brick or move on without the missing piece, it helps him become flexible and learn that things can still work out fine in the end.
The Creator 3in1 sets, where you build multiple things using the same bricks, are also great for nurturing flexibility. Not only does it teach your child that the same pieces put together in different ways can become new things, it teaches them that they need to break up one construction to build another!
Encourage speech
When your child can’t find the piece they want, they will probably indicate that they need help. This is an opportunity to encourage them to talk, to describe the colour, size and shape of the piece they’re looking for.
First, I ‘acted dumb’ and pretended not to know which piece my son wanted. I asked questions by offering options, to help him describe the missing piece.
Then, I looked at the pile of bricks on the table and said, ‘it’s on top of the big red brick’ or ‘it’s next to the long white piece’. I found this to be a good way of teaching him relational words like ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘below’ and ‘behind’.
Practise pointing
When my son asked for help, I encouraged him to point to the relevant place on the manual. If he was unresponsive, I deliberately pointed to a different part and asked ‘this one?’ This often prompted him to direct my finger to the correct part.
I used the opportunity to teach him how to point using his own finger.
Sometimes a brick fell off the table and rolled out of reach. That was another great opportunity to practise talking and pointing. By crawling under the table or bending down to stretch his arm and reach for the piece, my son was also unknowingly working on his gross motor skills!
Build finger strength
The obvious benefit of Lego is that it helps build finger strength through holding bricks and pressing them on top of each other.
But I also found that Lego provides opportunities for my son to practise opening containers. I put the bricks in various things like zip cases, tupperware and jars that require opening in different ways. The desire to play with the bricks helps motivate my son to open that jar!
Summary
Start with a fully constructed set. Gradually break it up and build it back up together
Help your child practise their fine motor skills by supporting them hand-over-hand.
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