Best suited for: Early, First Level & Second / Age 0-4, 5-7, 8-11
Maths involved: counting, sizes, patterns
Materials needed:
Lego/ Lego Duplo bricks (depending on age)
For older children, use regular Lego bricks and challenge them to create more complex versions of the festive designs in our example.
Building with Lego is a great opportunity to incorporate a little maths into children's play time. How many bricks do they need of each colour? What size of bricks - 2x2 blocks, or 2x4? While they're having fun, they're already learning maths without even realising it.
Have a go at recreating our festive Lego build ideas:
How many bricks do you need for each?
Which design needs the most bricks – the present, the tree or the candy cane?
Can you create the same designs with a different number of bricks? What’s the least number of bricks you can do it with?
Can you vary the colours to create different patterns?
Can you increase or decrease the number of bricks to make a bigger or smaller version of the same design?
Taking it further
Now try creating your own festive designs out of Lego! Can you include any repeating patterns or symmetry?
We've pulled together all our seasonal resources from the last three years, and thrown in a few new ones too, so that you can create your own Christmas Holiday Countdown depending on age, ability and preferences. With games, puzzles, art and craft activities to choose from, as well as our interactive puzzle mystery story.
To celebrate Book Week Scotland, we are delighted to announce the finalists and winners of our Maths Tales 2025 story-writing competition, run in partnership with Read Write Count with The First Minister.
