Schoolcraft - Minecraft Blocks for Teaching!
By Melissa Noad
Files
Directions
Print the blocks, laminate, and cut out the blocks. Attach magnets to the backs. Stick on blackboards, whiteboards, lockers, fridges, etc.
Ideas for use
I will be using these for my English board. I bought a magnetic whiteboard from Sunday for about 1500yen. You can use smaller ones from Daiso, but I wanted to give a lot of room for creativity and using markers for future activities. You can buy small plastic baskets from Daiso to put the pieces in. the long rectangular ones work well. You can tack them to a bristol board through the holes in the baskets and load them up with building blocks. You can use challenge themes to motivate the kids to make buildings. For example, one week students can make homes, castles the next, famous buildings, faces, transportation, the school, etc. Students can write their names next to their work and show it off, and you can take pictures and display their work. They can read the target in English ("Please build a house"), and you can stand by your English board and talk about building with the kids.
You can do the same things in your class. give packages of blocks to groups of students and have speed rounds of building. Students can work at their desks or at the blackboard where work can be seen more easily. Students can discuss their work to say why theirs is the best. You can use comparatives and superlatives, such as "Our house is the best because it is the tallest!" "Our house is the best because it is more colourful than theirs!"
You can also play a version of castles or read & run with this game, where students can answer questions in groups to earn pieces to make a building (make up rules as you please). If you want to add excitement, you can make a creeper rule where you can blow up part of another group's building (you can use a roll of a die to determine the number of pieces removed if you want). For those unfamiliar with creepers, they are monsters in the video game that can blow up (they're the green monsters). There are also zombies and people (his name is Steve) in the file. I cut around the characters and it makes them look nicer, but it's not necessary.
If you would like to add blocks, all I did was search "papercraft" in Google and then the type of block I wanted, such as glass or gold. In paint, crop the center block. You can select all and just drag the center block to the top left corner of Paint. Go into Attributes, and make the proportions 128x128. All the files from them should be the same size, so if this sizing isn't exact, you don't have the right image files. Save the file, and then add it to the blank table provided in the PowerPoint in "Format Shape" -> "Fill" -> "Picture Fill" and select the file.
More and more of my kids have been talking about Minecraft, so I thought they would enjoy this! To make bigger blocks, simply remove rows and columns of the table and make sure the sides are the same height and width in the layout tab. You will want larger pieces for smaller kids.
