About Beth

Beth Weis has been building with LEGO^® bricks her entire life. After the birth of her 4^th child in 1994, she developed a business to offset her building costs and provide social, emotional, cognitive, and motor skill enrichment to other children. She began teaching at South Park School and the Deerfield Park District. Shortly after its inception, “Learning through LEGO^®"earned the “Best New Early Childhood Program” award at a Parks and Recreation conference.
Beth now teaches 9 classes and facilitates several parties every week, in addition to workshops, volunteering, community events, camp and daycare programs, team-building, conventions, fairs, scouting events, and school visits. Beth’s latest project is building actual sized flags of the world with her classes to be displayed at "Brickworld" in June 2008. She also works in three-dimensional LEGO^® art and invites her students to assist.

I remember shopping for LEGO at Toy Heaven near my childhood house. When opening birthday gifts, the red and white wrapping paper was common, buying LEGO for a girl in the 60's wasn't. I played with my brothers' sets but really didn't become obsessed until the first LEGO McDonald's Happy Meal Toy in 1983. I spent many nights eating Happy Meals then shopping for LEGO at Toys R Us, and being embarrassed by my friend Sandy whizzing down the aisles on anything with wheels. Ironically, 25 years after college LEGO building, Sandy owns a local ice cream stores and I facilitate LEGO parties for his customers.

I began building famous home plans out of LEGO. Not Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, The Brady's, Petrie's, Partridge's, etc. I then starting noticing interesting houses while driving, and building their floor plans. I still enjoy this and always have a pad of graph paper nearby. By the time my first child was born in 88 (there goes my LEGO room), I had quite the collection of sets, and I was actually able to build them myself. I spent the next years mainly with DUPLO and building LEGO furniture. Most of the furniture I built predates the green brick and there is still no brown log burning in my LEGO fireplace.

Group building from multi-sensory instructions (auditory, visual, and tactile) allows more than one way to experience LEGO building and best suits each child's learning style. I started teaching group-building in 1996 and still continue to stay focused on the basics (overlapping, symmetry, and patterns) and a healthy mix of social, emotional, cognitive, and motor development. I now have a collection of 100's of original activities that can be built from standard bricks (thanks to the infamous "Blue Bucket" 3033 from 1998), and focus more on Team Building so the children have a combination group and individual activities during every class.

Beth

Beth's Lego Rooms

Coming soon: information on Beth's book project, graduate work in early childhood interpersonal skill development, and references.