Valentine Ideas- LEGO Heart Puzzle

I thought a creating a heart with a message for my son out of LEGOS would be one of those Valentine ideas that he would think was fun. One afternoon last week I dumped all of his LEGOS out of the LEGO Bucket container I made for JDaniel and searched for the red LEGOS of all different shapes and sizes. I also searched for long white LEGO to build my message. A LEGO classic green baseplate was used as the creation space.

When I was finished, I showed him the LEGO creation. He really loved it and wanted to know how I had put it together.  That got me thinking. I could take off some of the LEGO and create a puzzle for my son. He could spread out the pieces that I had taken out and try to figure out just where they needed to go to make the heart whole again. He would be helping me put it together after the fact.

Hint: It was a challenge to remove the bricks on the inside of the heart with my short finger nails. If you have brick separator, you may want to use it to remove the bricks. If you don’t have one, you may want to leave out some of the bricks as you create the heart. You can know where they will go, but just not put them in.

I told him the activity was called “Mending a Broken Heart”. I am not sure he got the name of the activity, but he sure had fun trying to figure out where all the pieces went to mend the heart.

Some of the pieces might look like they could go in several of the open areas. Some open space looked like one shape and were really made of two. If the right LEGO weren’t placed in the right areas, there would pieces leftover and open areas.My son found that it was easiest to put the bigger LEGOS in first and then move to the smaller areas.  To make this puzzle really hard you will want to remove a lot more bricks.

I just love that this one of those Valentine ideas that will stretch a child’s brain. Beyond brain stretching this activity works on fine motor skills, visual discrimination, and the math concepts of flipping and sliding.

Here are some other LEGO learning activities we have done:

LEGO Fraction Games

Geometry Riddles Solved with LEGO

Valentine Ideas – Graphing with Candy Hearts and LEGO

If you do try any of the above LEGO learning activities, please leave me a comment below telling me about it  or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.