You Must be a LEGO Master Educator Again

My daughter, Corrie, was so proud when she found out I would be a LEGO Master Educator in early May.

In mid-March 2020, I planned my first lessons for E Learning as COVID-19 led to schools moving online for the rest of the year.

Corrie came with me. She built a LEGO house, which, as I would later regret, took down for student use in the 2020-2021 school year on May 26, 2020. This was one day before my worst nightmare came true. I wish I still had it, but I have the picture.

Corrie builds in my classroom in March 2020.

Corrie was proud of her house design, and told me all about it while I planned. She often worked right by my side.

But as a student wrote to me after May 27th: “If I was your child, I would not want you to grieve for long, because you Mrs. Bridges are meant to go on…” He told me it wasn’t just for my husband and son, but future students. Somehow he felt, at the exact moment when I wanted to walk away from everything, I would still make a difference.

How in the world could I continue teaching when my angel was gone?

The answer lives in a question my daughter asked of me while at my second school.

“Do you love your students more than you love Hayes and me?” Corrie had asked.

A then three going on four-year-old asked me a question, and it was clear from her perspective, I adored my students in good and bad times.  Of course, I told my daughter I love her and her brother more than any children in the world. 

Never Comfortable in My Skin

In my life, it was rare for me to feel at ease in the presence of other adults or anyone my age. I felt, as I did as a child, that somehow if I did not do or view experiences in life the way in which others did, I missed something.

So often, I felt like I missed something.

As a child who went through continual psychological testing from 1990 to 1991, and at three- and four-years-old, experts wrote, “Rebecca shows echolalic tendencies.” I lacked an understanding to questions asked of me, and what I call a social cue GPS.

Knowing this about myself, I had to find a way to reach kids who view the world differently.

LEGO Master Educators Must Go On

As an author with works in small prints, I had recent rejection where the publishers loved the writing about my son and what it’s like to be atypical, but they wanted a positive realization in the end. In education, I want my students to build their positive self-realizations, and I want to send them forward confident in their abilities to:

• evaluate their own work,
• make real work connections,
• understand concepts of STEAM and project-based learning,
• build up the design process when students plan as they build and write

Every school year, I was working toward another level of STEAM, but I did not always know it.

Let’s be clear I:

• never played with LEGOs growing up,
• have yet to use the robotic LEGOs commonly use for robotics team,
• was willing to experiment

The pictures below are in order from the 2017-2018 school year to present showing some of the progression of the STEAM and project-based learning I tried to implement in classroom.

A common strategy, the “Post It” or “Park It Method,” students took an active part in analyzing Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech.

Many students I taught two years in a row remembered the stock market crash activity we did. Students got to play an active role as bankers or investors. The books were to prepare students for the approaching World War II Unit, so they read in Social Studies everyday for the first fifteen minutes their WWII novel of choice.

Stock Market Crash: Who lost money and who got to keep the money?  Students played an active role in experiencing a historic event, and chose the books they wanted to read.

After a while, I let students start doing the SS Word Wall, an important part of increasing our academic vocabulary in the classroom.

An example in the different way in which my atypical mind works, even as a teacher. I planned a year for sixth grade Social Studies before being moved to eighth grade ELA and SS. It is common for me to mind map lessons than write them in what I consider a boring fashion.

By year three, I had not reached the LEGO stage yet, but I wanted to try stations again. I wanted active walls, since my former school had these cool walls that opened.  I covered them because I could never stand blank walls.

To help create interdisciplinary connections in the classroom, I often did sketch or doodle notes in the classroom, especially for Social Studies.  Students needed to make those connections. This piece of work from the 2018-2019 school year was from a warm up about state environmental issue.

Students at my former school presented their products about different disabilities and illnesses they had researched in order to raise awareness at a STEAM Fair.

Students spoke with different people from other schools and the community about their research.

When it comes to project-based learning, I had help in creating the ELA Unit designed with the non-fiction reading, research and communication, and writing standards standards for students to solve the problem to the question: How Can I Raise Awareness about a Specific Disability?

Upon reflection of doing the PBL unit in February 2019 and again in 2020, I would change it to Abled Differently and Illness with students’ growing interest in different diseases. 

Students worked in the creation phase of their products. They were given in-class time. 

This is an amusement created by my son when he was about seven-years-old. My son, who I call Hayes in my writing, is autistic and similar to me as a child.  I was influenced by how he could learn with hands-on opportunities.

Students use notes to build representations and data in changes of population in SS in Dec. 2019.

A student built a representation when a character’s grandmother died.

Students build scenes last January from their book.

A student build this to represent a character’s nickname.

Students built LEGO ornaments as part of their novel discussion question tree.

Students wrote and built as they worked.

Students recently used LEGOs to build specific scenes in the French Revolution, and to put terms in their own words. They put thejr picture in their Google Doc.

Sometimes, as educators, we must look behind us to remind us of why we must move forward.