A Net in Time

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Lego

Organize Your Lego

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In this house, we like Lego. This weekend we decided to take apart and put our Lego away. We do this on a regular basis. We build things, play with them, store them and eventually dismantle them in order to play again. 🙂  Since we have a fairly massive Lego collection, this created a problem of how to store our Lego without it driving us crazy in the searching for pieces and how to display what we made well.   We tried various options like Rubbermaid bins, in the closet, under the bed and it just wasn’t working for us.   We needed a good way to organize our Lego and have a display shelf.

We’ve organized our lego a few times, each time fine tuning it.  This was the original method we used. 

Organize your lego with display shelfSince our first rendition, we got rid of the tiny bins, and simply changed what went where in our bins.

I use four of those stackable bins that you can find at Walmart or on Amazon.   The ones I use have five drawers rather than the ones you see here.  *images are clickable*
         
I find I can rearrange them as needed too, Sometimes I place them in a square and put a large square of wood on top for when we want to build pyramids and representations of Egypt or medieval or pioneer life.   I don’t leave the wheels on as I’ve learned THAT’s a recipe for disaster.

Below is a city/town that we are in process of taking down as we pack to move.  Gives an idea of how we change our set up once in a while.

Organizing lego with display shelf

Anyways, divide up the Lego however you want.  

Our division tends to be:

  • wheels/wheel part
  • lego build books
  • castle pieces
  • ones
  • twos
  • threes
  • fours
  • larger than fours
  • Large flats
  • Smooth flats
  • smaller flats
  • car parts
  • Axles and round holes
  • unusual pieces
  • figurines and all their paraphernalia
  • Tiny pieces (like flat ones)

Some types of Lego have so many pieces it takes two bins to hold them all.  

Basically pieces that are mostly similar find their home spot in the same places.  (like axles and the legos with holes in them go together), along with crane parts.   Things shift as we gain (and sometimes lose) various pieces.  All my StarGate Lego goes in one bin.

organizing lego with display shelfNo one will organize their Lego exactly the same way, so find a method that works for you and how you  think, and don’t be afraid to change it.  Ours has been revised several times since we started this method, and then as we discovered the joy of moving the bins and making a temporary table and what not. We’ve done the “let’s divide by colour” (colossal failure)  We’ve even transported them as needed to other homes for play dates with friends who don’t have Lego. 

This is our normal set up

organizing lego with display shelf

Organize your Lego, it makes playing with your Lego a lot more fun as you don’t have to spend all your time searching the corners of your bin for just the right piece.  Having a display shelf right with your lego stash keeps it all neat and tidy and off the floor.  

Join the crew this week in organizing your homeschool.

Art Book: How to Build Lego Cars

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Do you love building with Lego?   Do you see it for the art form that it is?  Yes, it’s STEM and building and engineering, but … it is also an art form.   You can really see it in these magnificantcars that Peter Blackert helps you design in How to Build Brick Cars.

Oh…these aren’t your standard lego cars…these are master builder cars that go on to inspire you to model your own creations.
15 different cars which work you up from basic to expert, teaching you the skills you need to design your own lego models of the sports, race, and muscle cars you see around you every day.

You get to build cars such as the Ford Raptor, Datsun Coupe, Ferrari 250, Porsche 911 and so many more.  15 cars all told.

You will find detailed parts lists as well as information about the car being built.  The parts list is in full colour with numbers written alongside.  I didn’t find those numbers worked well with the Lego Store, so they might be with another area?  I don’t know.  BUT I do know you could go into any Lego Store with this book and they could help you find any pieces that you need, with the picture is on the page along with colour.  Easy peasy!

After the opening section you get into the meat of the build.  Full colour illustrations walk you step by step through the build. As long as you are paying attention (and don’t skip steps) you can complete your build.

My thoughts:
This is a great book for any lego enthusiast.  Getting help to make the car of your dreams?  What more could you ask for.  The detailed instruction ensure that anyone who can follow lego instructions can complete these builds…just as long as you have all the lego parts at hand.    Go ahead, create some lego art!

How to Build Brick Cars: Detailed Lego Designs for Sports cars, race cars, and muscle cars.
Peter Blackert
MotorBooks
192 Pages
Paperback, oversized
Lego, creator, build, master builder, animals, design

Reviewed for: Quarto Group.

Where can I find it?

How to Build Brick Cars.    Amazon.ca   Or   Amazon.com.

This post may contain affiliate links – using affiliate links from A Net in Time helps fuel this blog and our homeschool – thank you! ©2006-2017 A Net In Time. All rights reserved. All text, photographs, artwork, and other content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of the author. A Net In Time . We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites

Art Book: Beasts from Bricks

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Oh, who doesn’t like to build with lego?  I spent hours as a child playing with lego and have had lots of fun playing with my boy child…though the older he gets the more he keeps himself busy with other things and plays less with his mama.  BUT this book is cool!  Making animals from around the world, using the designs in Beasts from Bricks.  It’s great!


15 different animals which take you through the different continents of the world, teaching you the skills you need to design your own lego models of various animals you can meet in your life (or perhaps WISH you could meet in real life).

You get to build animals such as the African Elephant, Indian rhinocerous, Suffolk sheep, walrus, jack rabbit, anteater and a wombat (as well as others).   I loved that each new animals was introduced to us along with why the author builder created them.

You will find detailed parts lists along with a colour key.  The parts list is in full colour with numbers written alongside.  I didn’t find those numbers worked well with the Lego Store, so they might be with another area?  I don’t know.  BUT I do know you could go into any Lego Store with this book and they could help you find any pieces that you need, since the picture is on the page along with it’s colour.  Easy peasy!

After the opening section you get into the meat of the build.  Full colour illustrations walk you step by step through the build. As long as you are paying attention (and don’t skip steps) you can complete your build.  You may even find yourself inspired to find other animals you can build.  Sometimes to just be changing the colour (as in making a white sheep black, or multi coloured), or by using the skills you have been taught to come up with your own designs.  Who knows what you’ll be able to build eh?

Little things I liked: Each animal is colour coded, so you know all the blue is one animal, different builds he’s made pictured at the back of book, clear instructions, image of finished animal, and the pedestal each animal is placed on so you aren’t limited to stance or flat surfaces.

My Thoughts:
Get this book.  Have fun learning about and then building animals from all over the world. It’ll be great fun, you know it!  🙂

Beasts from bricks
Ekow Nimako
Quarry books
144 pages
Softcover, oversized
Lego, building, STEM, animals, engineering

Reviewed for: Quarto Group

Where can I find it?
Beasts from bricks.  Amazon.ca    Or    Amazon.com.

This post may contain affiliate links – using affiliate links from A Net in Time helps fuel this blog and our homeschool – thank you! ©2006-2017 A Net In Time. All rights reserved. All text, photographs, artwork, and other content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of the author. A Net In Time . We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites

Learning over time

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Yesterday we did reading and housecleaning.  We read all our normal books.  Played pirates.  Learned what some valuable things are now-a-days that pirates might want to steal so we’ve been having pirates stealing art!

Today we spent time on Studyladder.       We worked on sight words, blending, using descriptive language, and what not.  In the afternoon we went for a walk at the dam.  We took a different trail than normal and we spent time looking under stones and deadfall to see what type of insects we could find.  

We seemed to be plum out of luck in finding anything other than the ordinary ants, earthworms, small black spiders and pill bugs UNTIL we stopped to look at a sign and there we saw an interesting bug which obliged us by staying still long enough to be captured in our insect catcher. 🙂   We want to show the lad who is teaching the bug class during HOPE days tomorrow.

What else?   

OOH.. we had a LOT of fun watching some water spiders

They were sculling back and forth on a stream we came across.  It was the lad who first saw how interesting their shadows were.   The lad had fun experimenting with what he could do to make them come out and play and what would make them go and hide. 

We saw a variety of interesting small flowers coming out to bloom.  Trilliums and dog tooth violets, then these funky little yellow ones that made me think of violas but they weren’t, and these white and purple ones that grew together in the same patch.  Haven’t a clue what they are called but they inspired comment.  

On an interesting side-note.  Two things have merged in my son’s playtime lately.
One. we read the newspaper together at breakfast.    We talk about the news, we sometimes learn from the news (aka the other day we read two different articles that had to do with genetics and research), and of course we read the comics.
Two. Lego city has a website with games on it.  one of those games is a chance to create your own comic strip using lego characters.  This totally captured his imagination and he had SO much fun with it.

The merger:  OH My but the lad is having fun creating tiny newspapers WITH comics strips.  The angry birds are busy doing funny things in their stories, and the borrowers (a movie we’ve watched recently) are busy telling a story too.   These are multi-day comic strips.   He has news articles and ads and all sorts of things in them.  They are tiny as the lego characters must carry them around, and they are rolled up just as the newspapers are rolled up.  🙂  Every once in a while I get the question of “Mommy.. do you think they would write about this in the newspaper?”   My standard answer is “Sure, why not?  They write about all sorts of things.” 

plans change

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Our plans for the day changed

We had planned to go to Dairy days with the homeschool group.  But it was cancelled due to weather issues

So this morning we went skating.
Then played lego.  We built, we discussed, we had fun.

Then we set off to work with our Spiders Unit Study.


The lad’s question of the day was Where do spiders go in the winter?  the answer from here.

Did you ever wonder where all the spiders go in the winter? 
(Excluding those little rascals you still find occasionally in your
house!)  Do they die?  Do they hibernate? Do they just hide somewhere
where you don’t see all of them?
Different types of spiders
handle the winter months differently.  There are those spiders that like
to come on in and dwell with us in our nice warm homes.  Others,
however, will die in the winter but leave their egg sacs well protected
to hatch out the next spring.  Some actually do prepare for winter by
weaving a web under loose bark or building overhangs where they are
insulated from the cold

This of course inspired a game in a young lad’s mind.  Let’s pretend to be spiders trying to get to winter safety without being caught by an enemy.  so we played a few rounds of this.

today we learned about the lifecycle of a spider.

We talked about how spiders are both prey and predator and the lad made the observation that this happens alot with animals..but it doesn’t happen with robots (because nothing eats robots).

we read the story by Eileen Snyder called   The Little Old Lady Who Liked Spiders

So then the above game became can you avoid the lizards who just might eat spiders?   So we played that was well.

I expect that soon my voice will be back to normal and we can get back to our regular reading times.

Spiders and Lego

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At breakfast we did our normal reading

10 minute stories

Today’s story was about a fellow who was very lazy and how he learned not to be so very lazy.   The lad says “I liked it!”

World History

We continue learning about Knights and Castles.  Today we learned about how a person learns to be a knight.

Link
We continued work on our spider study
The lad was very eager to do this. I had promised him that we could play with Lego today and build spider webs and a spider with it today. 🙂 Here’s to creative thinking! 🙂  So today we focused on learning about different types of spider webs.

Webs have different purposes, according to the individual species of spider, how it captures or stores its prey. Spider’s silk can be used to help small, young spiders transport to new areas (ballooning) or be so strong that it is used to make fish nets, as with the Nephila spider web.
Other types of spider webs:

Tangled Web Spiders
Tangled spider webs consist of a shapeless jumble of threads 
attached to a support such as the corner of a ceiling.  Cobwebs are
tangled webs that have collected dust and dirt. 
Cellar spiders, the comb-footed spiders (included black and brown widow
spiders), the ogre-faced stick spiders and common house spiders are
spiders that make these types of webs. 


 Sheet Webs

Sheet webs are flat sheets of silk between blades of grass or
branches of shrubs or trees. Spiders that create sheet webs also spin a
net of crisscrossed threads above the sheet. 
When a flying insect hits the net, it bounces into the sheet web.  The
spider, which hangs upside down beneath the web, quickly runs to the insect and pulls it through the webbing. 
Sheet webs last a long time because the spider repairs any damaged parts. 
The bowl & doily spider, the filmy dome spider, and the platform spider form sheet webs.


Gum-footed Webs

Gum-footed webs consist of tightly woven silk strands attached
between two branches. 
The upper strands are dry and built in sheltered areas away from
sunlight while the lower strands are built in exposed area and run down
to a bottom branch where they are attached. 
Each of the lower sticky strands are covered in sticky droplets and are
attached weakly at the bottom. 
When an insect walks into the sticky silk strands its struggle break the
lines moving the web upwards and lifting the prey off the ground
reducing its chances of escaping.
Redback spiders create gum-footed webs.

Horizontal Line Webs

Horizontal Line Webs are made up of one simple line of
sticky droplets stretching across low vegetation, bark and leaf litter. 
Spiders that create this type of web pull the line taut by keeping the
slack silk underneath them until an insect hits the line. 
When that happens, the loose silk whips along the line and tangles the
prey. 
Cribellate spiders and other pea-sized spiders create these webs.   Pic from here.




Bolas Spider Web

The Bolas Spider Web is a very simple web designed for
their unique method of hunting. 
In order to hunt and catch male moths, the bolas spider sits on a
horizontal line and spins a single line with a sticky silk tip that
dangles from its leg. 
While
waiting, this spider will emit a scent similar to a female moth.  When
the male moth comes toward the spider, the spider swings the sticky
strand in a circle and captures the moth, pulling the strand in to feed.


Triangle Webs

Triangle Webs are created in the shape of a triangle, hence its name. 
The spider weaves silky strands of spokes and spirals that connect to all three strands. 
The triangle spider waits at one end of the web for an insect to land. 
When it does, the 

spider shakes the web so the insect is caught and cannot
escape.

quite fascinating all in all. hard to find images of all the different types of webs. As I find them, I’ll add them in. 🙂

We built a couple of lego webs complete with spiders.  

And then did some spider math.  I started out with 10 spiders sitting in a tree and then a variety of things happened, at one point we were up to 54 spiders in the tree and eventually got down to 0 spiders in a tree.  All done verbally and mentally with the occasional bit of help from a calender and pencil…he is only 6 after all!  🙂