Fun Fridays - Lego Challenges to Go!

Jamie Mercer is the Head of Youth Services at W.J. Niederkorn (Port Washington) Library and shares some extra fun with easy and/or FREE programming ideas/tips.

Image by Francis Ray from Pixabay

Happy Friday! 

Here is a great program if you are short on space and/or staff time.  LEGO Challenges to GO! 

While I love a good LEGO club, our community room is often booked, and there’s also only so much time in a day.  Enter LEGO Challenges to GO!  This is a program that came out of the pandemic but is still a crowd pleaser.  Due to very generous donations, we have a massive amount of LEGOs and Duplos.   

For the challenges, we take sandwich bags and fill them with LEGOs.  Next, we create a check-out sheet for challenge day (because our library has made the choice not to catalog and barcode all the bags).  Information that we require includes name and contact information.  We also take library card number if the patron has a library account.  

On LEGO Challenge Day, patrons come and check out a bag of LEGOs or Duplos and they are given a challenge (everyone is given the same challenge…such as build a time machine, build a tool that cleans ocean pollution, etc.).   

The patron takes their bag of LEGOs and returns their finished creation within a week (and any leftover pieces that they didn’t want to use) and we put the creation on display in the library until the next challenge date.  We have had great success with the LEGOs coming back.  We check off patrons as they return their creations. 

Again, this is a great program if you don’t have the space to run a LEGO club or if you don’t have the staff or staff time to run the program.  Patrons still enjoy the challenge and love to put their creations on display.