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Goal

Students will examine how the author's choice to use complex fiction elements (irony, flashback, multiple/conflicting character motivations or dialogue) created effects, such as tension, provoked action, and manipulated the theme.  

What will be done with my students

In groups of two to four, students choose one of the six events from the book or the seventh option which summarizes all of the short story “A Sound of Thunder” to recreate using LEGO® blocks and minifigures. Each chapter has a pre-made box with the components that must be included in your representation. The rest of the setting is up to your interpretation.

Every group is responsible for their components, must return the components before the period ends, and wait for teacher to verify there are no missing components.

The best option is to create a stop motion animation. The following link will help greatly: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+do+lego+stop+motion+animation

The secondary option is to create a comic strip. Take pictures of the sets you create. Print these out in color using the class flash drives, color printer, and laptop. Then, add speech bubbles and captions.  

Benefits to my students

With Lego blocks, the same pieces can be assembled and reassembled into objects, prompted and limited only by one's imagination. Thus, a castle today becomes a spaceship tomorrow, and a spaceship may easily morph into a fire engine by reassembling the same pieces in a new configuration. However, Lego is much more than a building toy that comes in defined packages with step-by-step instructions, calling for the replication of an already imagined or popularized object.
Creative Lego constructions can also be used as instructional tools to illustrate abstract concepts or ideas. Instead of using PowerPoint slides, which are oversimplified, poor visual aids, consider building a three-dimensional object that best represents, for example, the ideas and workings of Edgar Allen Poe, Anne Frank, or Ray Bradbury whose evocative language is too often constrained to print. Also, asking students to explore abstract or symbolic concepts with the use of Lego blocks engages their whole body and provides opportunities for collective creativity and collaboration.
As a storytelling device, Lego can also enhance visual and multimodal literacy skills. I often ask students to create scenes or illustrations for the stories they explore in the classroom. This is free range for those with an eye and hand for aesthetic. However, for those, whose drawing skills may be crude or undeveloped, this may be a sticking point. However, these students can exercise those same cerebral skills with greater confidence by using Lego blocks to create a version or adaptation of an existing story or to build scenes from new stories they’ve created. With simple, easy-to-use applications and tools, students can create virtual or physical picture books with the use of Lego. Similarly, an inexpensive tripod and a smartphone can allow students to use stop-motion animation to produce and share short films or movie trailers for books.
In addition, Lego’s visual building manuals are among the best guides to aid the process of assembly. They function as a universal language without the need for one’s ability to read written text. Students can use these manuals as a model to produce virtual building manuals for their own Lego products, and by doing this they improve their skills of visual communication.Lego is inherently a creative medium. If we value the use of imaginative classroom engagements to instigate divergent thinking, play, and problem solving, Lego blocks deserve a distinguished place in our instructional toolbox.
 

Budget Narrative

If considered, I am flexible in the amount I am afforded. Legos are an indisputably expensive product, but their popularity and versatility equally undeniable. Language Arts is usually the most difficult subject to engage students, and I know this will get them one step forward both creatively and cognitively.  

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