A helping hand

• Make sure that you've visited www.LEGOeducation/start and watched the My XL World onboarding videos.
• Watch the video in the top right corner of this page to get an overview of this lesson.
• Select the inspiration cards you'll need for the lesson.
• Set up a designated space in your classroom that will allow the children to easily build and role-play with their models.

Show the children the inspiration card of the farm, and read this short story aloud.

It’s harvest time! Wei and his parents are super busy with work on the farm. Luckily, he has many friends who'd like to help. Today, Zoe, Xavier, and Xavier's bear are going to help pick all of the apples from the apple trees. Victor is going to help Wei stack hay in the barn. And Uma and Yasmin have brought a delicious lunch for everyone.

Facilitate a quick discussion about helping others. Ask questions, like:

• Have you or your parents ever helped other people or been helped by others? What happened?
• Can you think of some ways that you could help people?

Tell the children that they're going to build a helping scenario.
Have them work in pairs to build a scenario where they're helping someone.
They can use their imaginations to create a new model or use the examples below for guidance.
Once everyone has finished building, arrange the models in one place so the children can see what others have made.

Gather the children together. Ask them to take turns presenting their models and role-playing their scenarios using LEGO^® DUPLO^® figures.
Talk about some of the ways people help each other and why it’s important.
Ask the children to think about what they've built and facilitate a discussion by asking guiding questions, like:

• Why is it important to help people?
• Why do people need help sometimes?
• How did you feel after you helped someone or were helped by someone else?

Encourage the children to build a gift for each of LEGO^® DUPLO^® figures who offered to help in their scenarios. Explain that the gifts should be useful, and perhaps even be something that the LEGO^® DUPLO^® figures could use to help other people.
Before they start building, encourage the children to discuss what the gifts could be.
Ask guiding questions, like this, to support the children’s building:

• Can you think of something that would be very useful in helping other people?

Evaluate the children’s skills development by observing if they’re:

• Participating as part of the classroom community, feeling accepted, and gaining a sense of belonging
• Using their creativity to solve simple problems, and showing the ability to make choices

Simplify this lesson by:

• Assigning each pair of children one model to build
• Running the lesson with a smaller group (i.e., 3-4 children) and providing more support with building

Increase the difficulty by:

• Encouraging the children to use LEGO^® DUPLO^® bricks to create more helping scenarios

LANGUAGE ARTS EXTENSION
Ask each pair of children to use their helping scenario models and the LEGO^® DUPLO^® figures to present to the whole class/group a “help story” that includes a proper beginning, middle, and end.