Back-to-School LEGO Building Ideas

Here are some fun LEGO building ideas that are perfect for back-to-school time!

Challenge kids to build a school bus, a lunch box with food inside, and more. You can even build something useful like a marker cup or a desk organizer!

These building ideas are designed for kids to do with the bricks they already have. Encourage your kids to make modifications with the colors they have.

LEGO Apples

Build some adorable red and green apples! These make great decorations during back-to-school time.

The little apples are super simple. Each one is two 2 x 2 inverted slope bricks, two 2 x 2 slope bricks, and a 2 x 4 brick. Then for the stem I used two 1 x 1 brown round plates and a 1 x 2 green plate for the leaf.

The larger apple is a similar design, just one stud wider and two plates taller.

Here’s how we attached the stem on this one:

LEGO Desk

Build a desk with a little lamp and everything! We put a 2 x 2 round brick under the chair to make it the height we wanted.

Here’s a better look at the desk. The drawers are 1 x 2 jumper plates attached to bricks that have a stud on the side.

We got that little book from the Disney minifigure series, but there are several sets that have come with books! Hopefully you can find one.

LEGO Marker Jar or Pencil Jar

Here’s a project that’s super easy and also very useful! Make a LEGO jar to hold markers or pencils.

If you want a bigger project, you might want to try making this LEGO Desk Organizer! It has working drawers and everything.

You can see building instruction here.

LEGO School Bus

Challenge kids to build a school bus! I made a little one, but if kids have enough bricks it would be fun to build a bus that is large enough to hold LEGO minifigures.

I built this school bus entirely with bricks from the LEGO Classic Creative Vehicles set. This is a great set for getting a bunch of wheels and those clear bricks for making windshields.

LEGO Lunch Box

My son Owen built this LEGO lunch box with food that really fits inside! It’s so adorable, and fun to play with. We had some friends over last week, and the kids loved putting the food inside and taking it out again.

Owen made a sandwich, an Oreo style cookie, and then used one of the apples that we had already built.

It all fits inside the lunchbox like this:

And then here’s a close up photo of the food. It’s all super simple!

And then here’s the lunchbox all closed up. If you use a combination of tiles and also tiles with have a stud on each end, it will be much easier to take the lid off and put it back on again.

We would have loved to find a way to open the lunchbox with a hinge like a real lunchbox, but that is honestly a little trick with LEGO bricks. We decided to keep it simple and attainable for kids to make, and also something that they would likely have the right pieces for.

LEGO Learning Activities

Build some LEGO letters! Kids can build their initials, their entire name, or even the entire alphabet.

It’s not difficult at all to make letters out of basic bricks!

We have a whole collection of Hands-On LEGO Math Activities for the elementary grades. There are tons of fun ideas in here for teaching addition with regrouping, place value, multiplication, fractions, and more. LEGO bricks are my favorite math manipulative!