After school Lego Story Starter

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I have been teaching a LEGO story starter class for the fall semester. It has been a lot of fun and challenging. I have 23 students 1st grade through 4th grade. I have them for 1 hour 15 min. Lego story starter is a  hit with the students. They come from a long day of school directly into my classroom and very enthusiastically ready to build. Lego Story Starter comes with cirriculum but I found that it was very difficult to teach the program and build all that lego wanted you to to do in my short time frame.  As the kids got used to the program I made up my own themes. Some of the themes were: favorite activity over summer break, something that represents our school, favorite Bible story, favorite movie, favorite book, Thanksgiving, name etc.
I set up my hour like this: first the kids came in and we talked about what the theme for today.
Then I had kids start building and others on the computers working on the pictures from the previous week and turning them into comics.
The students would build their scenes and then I would take a picture of it. They would then go to the computer and type their comic from last week. After they were finished with both projects they would be able to free build.
Getting the kids to type over build was a bit difficult... they preferred to play.
Lego Story Starter is a wonderful program for fun creative learning experience. It takes a bit of time to get children familiar with the comic program. Once kids get used to the idea of building and telling their stories the process becomes less work and more fun..
The students loved the attention of getting a picture of their project. They would even ask during free build if I could take a picture of their work.

 We did LEGO's idea of the 2 knight and Princess story and the kids worked in groups of three and told their story in 3 scenes. This was a good week of lots of team work and fun. The next week the kids turned their scenes into a comic. It was difficult having 3 kids work on a single computer. The students were very proud of the out come.

**There are over 1,000 pieces in each box. I had 5 boxes in my classroom. Leave plenty of time for breaking down, cleaning the floor and organizing pieces into correct spot.
Clean up was difficult at times....

 I would teach this class again.