Thats great. I was wondering if you have any tips… my 3 year old is currently getting very frustrated when he doesnt get things right and is having a meltdown… how can I help him overcome this when trying difficult tasks like your son in this video?
Hi Mandi, OK, FWIW…actually my son is also often a little perfectionist too, which keeps him from getting interested in some things. I try not to push him. Different kids like to do different things, just like bigger people, and just because a child is advanced in one area, that doesn’t mean he should be expected to be advanced in all areas–this is true even of kids with very high IQs. My boy is totally into legos for whatever reason.
He wouldn’t have been able to do what you see him do in this video without HOURS AND HOURS of playing, which he did. The first time we did any legos, I think I put the legos together for him, and he was very eager to “help.” Pretty soon, I was giving him the legos and telling him, “Put this one there.” The next step, I had him start looking at the instructions, and told him when we were done with one step and ready to move on to the next, but I was still handing him the pieces. Then I started having him find the easiest-to-find pieces (in our lego baggies, and later, drawers as you see here). Only after quite a few months was he able to read a whole diagram and find the pieces himself, and usually he’s comfortable doing this only for models, like this, that we’ve worked on together before. He can now build the simpler models himself, but only if we’ve done them before. I guess the next step will be to get him a very simple set and have him make it all by himself from scratch.
He wouldn’t have made the progress, I’m sure, if he had not spent HOURS playing with legos by himself, making enormous messes for me to clean up. (Mama won’t clean it up, because she doesn’t understand the filing system. 
)
As to meltdowns, I don’t know what to do about them really, but FWIW if I see that my son is getting very impatient or frustrated, I take that as a sign to switch activities, and I make a mental note to take that (the thing that was causing frustration) more slowly next time.
This is incredible! I am not sure I have the patience to teach my little one how to do that. I bought him that stuff for Christmas but when I saw all the little parts, I put it up for when he gets older. Colin is about a year younger then your son, so now I am thinking maybe I can start to teach him how to do this. I am just not sure that I can take it.
Great vid, thanks for sharing! I never managed to get Felicity off the bigger Duplo lego set!
It takes a lot of patience especially to clean up all those legos. But he absolutely loves his legos. He’d do it all day long, and I have to put them away if I want him to make a mess, instead, with books. Books are frankly his fallback if he can’t use legos.
That’s amazing Daddude…
May I know when you introduced lego to him…at what age? I think my son will be very interested in such things, but I am worried about the small parts.
I think he got his first lego set for Christmas in 2008, so he was 2.5 years old. I was nervous too, but he had by then long stopped putting random objects in his mouth, and at first I was with him and watching closely whenever we played.