Students homework was to watch a BrainPop video and to take notes. They were also encouraged to do some extra reading and to include this information in their notes. They also broke down their notes into individual events.
We handed out baseplates and green, orange and red bricks. Students looked at their notes, in the order they wrote them, and decided if each note related to the start (green), middle (orange) or end (red) of his life and placed the bricks on the baseplate in that order.
Students were then asked to make some observations on the Lego patterns. We had some great responses including "I have far too much information about the middle of his life and not enough about the start" and "Although the middle of his life was more important, I probably need more green bricks, because a biography should cover the whole of a person's life."
Students then re-ordered their notes and were told to select one event which corresponded with a green brick, another with an orange brick and finally one for a red brick.
Students then re-ordered their notes and were told to select one event which corresponded with a green brick, another with an orange brick and finally one for a red brick.
Students were then given the task of making a Lego scene to correspond to each of the three events and were asked to take detailed photographs of each creation.
Green-Gandhi confessing to his father after stealing gold from his brother.
Orange-Gandhi moves to South Africa.
Orange - Gandhi moves to London and goes to university at UCL
Red-Assassination of Gandhi
We wanted our students to put their images on Explain Everything to create a mini biography of Gandhi. Michelle had spent some time working on a fantastic example to model to our students.
On the front cover Michelle pointed out all the things their biographies would need, including Gandhi's name, a witty title, the author and an image. Of course we had the students use Mini Mi to create a Lego Gandhi!
Students were tasked with creating their three chapters. This would include an information box, photograph, exciting chapter name and page number. Students were allowed to change backgrounds, fonts and the layout to make it as visually engaging as possible.
They then found a quiet place and placed an audio recording on top of each chapter. This was not there for them to record what was happening in the scene or Gandhi's life, but a space for them to talk about symbolism and the different Lego choice they made.
Students made comments like "I chose to make the prison cell very small as it is not a nice place to be" and "I gave the dad a hat, as he was an authority figure and worked for the Government" and "I gave Gandhi a beard in the last scene to show that he was older and it was toward the end of his life."
Lastly students had to write a page for CAPTAIN REFLECTOR! Michelle designed this minifigure and page idea to get students to reflect on the whole process and I chose some questions to help them with their responses!
CAPTAIN REFLECTOR!
My Reflection so far: This has been a fantastic project and students have completed a huge amount of work in a very short time! It is definitely giving me even more ideas for ways I can use Lego in my lessons and I am already writing two units based around Lego, (Lego and Gender and Lego, Social Media and Advertising).
We also had a lovely visitor from Lego Education, who helped us to get even more excited about our Lego project! Thanks Neil!
