Lego Challenge–Disaster Island

Believe it or not, I got the idea for this one from “Oregon Trail.”  Only this time, there’s no dysentery 🙂

After we went over the rules of Lego Club, I started talking about the theme.  I told my kiddos that they would be building their own deserted island for about 20 minutes.  And they can build it however they want.

After 20 minutes of a free build everyone pulled a Disaster Card:

I have a Publisher file at Teachers Pay Teachers for free if you want to use these cards.

Whatever disaster they pull will now happen to their island, so they need to find a way to fix it.  The idea is to NOT destroy what they already built, but add to their island to solve their problem!!  No one HAD to pick a disaster, they could just keep building like normal–but nearly every kid did, regardless of age.

Here’s some examples:

This island needed food, so they built some bushes and vegetables.  Yum yum.

This island was going to sink, so they built a ladder to get to higher ground.  Nice!

A hurricane was going to hit this island, so they put a roof on their house.  And a siren to warn everyone.

Overall it worked out pretty well.  However, some kids finished fixing their disasters faster than I thought they would.  So some kids kept picking extra disasters, which was fine.  Some of their islands kinda turned into hot messes because of that, but they had a great time telling the group all the disasters they had to fix!

Here’s a video I did talking a bit more about the project with some more examples:

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