In term three, BISP Primary School Staff had the opportunity to attend an in-house training of Brick by Brick (Lego Therapy) with Laura Smith.
Lego Therapy was originally developed as an intervention to help establish effective social skills for children and young people with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder but has also been found to be extremely effective with any child who may require some support to develop their social communication skills.
Social communication skills play a vital role in our ability to form meaningful social relationships and enable us to function happily and successfully in everyday life. These structured sessions can help to develop these various skills including, attention, sharing and turn-taking, collaborative problem solving, and verbal and nonverbal communication skills without the need for direct teaching.
In Lego Therapy, children are assigned 3 different roles; the engineer oversees the design and makes sure it is followed. The builder puts the bricks together and the supplier keeps track of the type and colour of bricks that are needed and gives the bricks to the builder. An adult will then act as a facilitator and can support positive interactions, suggest compromises, provide prompts as necessary, and keep the group on task.
As you can see from the pictures the teachers were having a lot of fun and can’t wait to introduce this intervention to the children!