Hi Friends,
Today we will, er, um, I don't want to give it away quite yet...so listen up & we will talk about the who's & what's of the title & author after the story:
(That was chapter one from the book What is Lego? by Jim O'Connor.)
Questions, so many questions.
1. Can you remember what the motto Oleg told his son, Godtfred that formed the guiding principle of his business? Grab a paper & pen or turn to talk to a friend/grownup. See if you can come up with a list of pros & cons that could come from living or working with Oleg's motto "Only the best is good enough." Do you have a motto or words to live by?
2. The origins of the word LEGO come from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well." Oleg took the first two letters of each word le + go to make the new name. Interestingly, the Latin word lego means "I assemble." Some of the best ways a company can set itself apart is by having a unique name to associate with the product. Google, Pepsi & Ikea, to name a few, have really interesting stories behind the name. Righty so here's the task:
-write your full name on a paper
-anagram it into as many words as you can. (Anagram is rearrange the letters in a word or group of words to make new words. For example, the word Bookkitty can be anagrammed into By Kit Took or Bitty Kook.)
-take the first two letters of each part of your name & arrange them to make a new word, like Oleg Christiansen did to make the name LEGO. What kind of business or product would be a good match for this new name?
-write your name backwards, say it out loud 3 times fast. Does it sound funny, can you imagine a character for a book with that name? Hmmm....
...
(isn't brainstorming awesome!?!)
3. Quick challenge time: if you have LEGO, go get a handful of bricks. If you don't have LEGO, grab a handful of blocks, marshmellows, toothpicks...something that could be stacked up. Put on a timer for 2 minutes, see how tall you can build with just a handful of (bricks). Set the timer for another 2 minutes, see what kind of vehicle you with that same handful of (bricks). Set the timer again, this time for 5 minutes. Try to make your name out of the items. Come up with your own challenges! Make an obstacle course for a worm, create a house for a miniature dinosaur, design a stand that could hold a cellphone without collapsing....the possibilities are endless.
That's part of the fun of writing. Words are made of little parts, like LEGO bricks, letters are used for infinite possible combinations. Just like a brickmaster, it takes time to learn the tools to become a wordsmith. But keep at it, someday you could be the next Poet Laureate:
And one more thing to chew on before you go:
With 'Scratch,' you create computer programs by snapping together graphical programming blocks, much like LEGO bricks. ~Mitchel Resnick
Toodleloo, Kangaroos
Today's book was: What is Lego? by Jim O'Connor. These books are part of a super popular series of nonfiction books published by Penguin Random House.
You can learn more about the history of LEGO or the history of the world as expressed in LEGO. Check out some awesome LEGO artists or meet one of the LEGO designers. Thanks to Pexels contributers for providing awesome video clips.