New Lego Wall !!

Part of transforming spaces is all the rage in the library world these days.  So one thing that I found that I really thought could be interesting was a post that I saw about a LEGO wall.  I had been to the ISTE conference in Philadelphia two years ago and started following a blog of one of the award winners named Diana Rendina.  She had posted her ideas on making a lego wall.  I liked the idea and thought this was something that we could do at McGuire.
So the first thing I did was bring up the idea to our principal.  When he said sure see what happens I thought great! Here we go!!

 I know legos are expensive so the very first thing I did was put out a request for a donation of legos.  Only a few people donated but that's all I needed.  We did get a couple of big boxes of legos.
The next part was a little more tricky believe it or not it wasn't easy to get all of the lego boards at one time.  Several places would only sell 3 at a time.  Thankfully I have this wonderful secretary Deann Haugland who went to a few different places for me a few different times to purchase them.  Even Amazon and lego.com limited the amount in the cart.

Another amazing person in my building (John Swedin) our custodian was so helpful and purchased the board  and cut it to the right size so it could be mounted.

Now I had all my plates to glue down and my board but then someone mentioned maybe you should paint the edge like a frame.  So I purchased some yellow paint as close to lego yellow as I could and painted a border on the edge of the board.

I followed  the directions from the blog measuring where the plates would be put on the board, using liquid nails to adhere the boards and using lego pieces to keep the boards in place.

Finally the board was done and once again John helped me out by securing the board to the wall.  I put out just a few legos to see how it would go and it was great.  I will add more as time goes on but right now  I am trying to figure out what I would like to use to keep some containers of them close by.

So what will we do with the lego wall?  Well I am hoping we can make some ties into literature, maybe a math problem or even just some cool art.

It is so fun to watch students walk over and start creating some things on our wall.  Just with a few legos there was already a bird, a fan and a few kids names.