Activities for Teaching Fractions with LEGO Bricks

Let’s do some LEGO fractions activities! This is such a fun and hands on way to teach kids about fractions.

In this post, we’ll show you how to use LEGO bricks to look at fractions from a variety of angles. These activities are perfect for kids in the early elementary grades, or ages 7 – 9 or so.

We love using LEGO bricks as hands-on math manipulatives. You can see all our LEGO Math Activities here.

This post was updated in July 2022.

Build LEGO Fractions

It’s really easy to build fractions with LEGO.  We built 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 by making towers with LEGO® bricks.

You can also use colored towers like this to teach equivalent fractions. You can see in the photo below that the red and yellow tower that represents 1/2 is actually 4/8.

Here’s a cool way to build equivalent fractions.

We started with a 1 x 12 brick on the bottom (the light gray one). The great thing about 12 is that you can make twelfths, sixths, quarters, thirds and halves.

It’s fun to try different bricks as the “whole.” Kids can explore what fractions they can make with a 1 x 8 brick, a 1 x 10 brick, etc.

DIY Fractions “Worksheet”

Use a 32 x 32 LEGO baseplate to create a fractions worksheet of sorts.

I built the fractions, and then my 8 year old had to determine what fraction of each rectangle was blue. For example, the rectangle on the top left has five 2 x 2 bricks, and one of them is blue. So the fraction would be 1/5.

It worked really well!

This activity also is great for talking about equivalent fractions. My daughter was adamant that the yellow and blue rectangle was 2/4. I explained how it would also be correct to say it’s 1/2.

What fractions can you make out of a tower of bricks?

Here’s another way to approach fractions. Use LEGO towers to look at fractional parts of a whole. If you have a tower of 20 bricks, can you divide it evenly into halves? Thirds? Fourths?

In real life, we sometimes use fractions to cut something like a pizza into a certain number of slices. Other times, we want to know how many would be 1/4 or 1/2 of a larger number. If there are 20 cookies in the package, how much is half of them?

Later, students will learn that they can figure this out by multiplying. 1/2 of 20 is the same as 1/2 x 20, or 10. For now, use LEGO bricks as a hands-on way to figure out how to divide a number into parts.

You can print this activity! I made three options. There are two pages with different numbers for the towers. Then one page has blank squares so that you can write in the tower heights yourself. This is perfect if you’re needing to start with smaller numbers or want to explore larger numbers.

The child should start by building a tower the specified height.

Then they can try dividing the tower into halves, thirds, fourths, and so on. Will it divide evenly? Or not? Record that on the sheet!

My 8 year old found this activity very interesting! She was surprised that 20 would not divide into thirds.

Ready to print your brick tower fractions pages? Follow the link below. The file will open and you can print from there.

Brick Tower Fractions Pages

Different Ways to Show 1/2

The last thing we did was to explore different ways to show 1/2.  The size of a half can change depending on how big the whole is!  We talked about how 1/2 of $500 is a lot more than 1/2 of $10.

Be sure to check out the rest of the LEGO® Math Series:

• Preschool Roll and Count
• Two Math Activities Using Duplos
• How many Legos does it weigh?
• Grouping – Getting ready for multiplication
• Teaching multiplication – a 3D Lego approach!
• Multiplication with Legos – Candy store math problem (geometric model for multiplication

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