+353 (0)53-9230344
info@cpdcollege.com
SBSEN - Six Bricks
Putting fun, colour and energy into skills-building for SEN.
Format: Online
Course duration: 20 hours
About the Course
Is there a more exciting, dynamic or inclusive teaching and learning resource than Lego Six Bricks?
Not that we know of!
Using a collection of just Six Lego Duplo, eight stud bricks & accompanying materials, our team have created and spotlighted endless ways that just Six Lego Bricks can be used to support inclusive teaching, learning and assessment in the classroom to meet the diverse needs of students.
The CPD College team have developed and provide Six Bricks activities and games to practice and strengthen:
- 19 Key Perceptual Skills for SEN
- Many concepts, skills and dispositions for SEN across the five strands mathematics
- Targeted oral language, reading and writing skills for students with SEN
- Assessment approaches through implementing Six Bricks with SEN
- Social, emotional and physical skills & wellbeing for all, but particularly for SEN
Six Bricks is the 'wonder resource' when it comes to intervening and supporting SEN.
Six Bricks is not just educational material; It has now become a pedagogy across curricula in primary schools and particularly in intervention settings.
If you are a SET teacher supporting SEN, then join us in summer 2025 to acquire a new tool and set of skills to support highly effective teaching for those children that need it most, the child with SEN.
Enrol today and prepare to confidently step into the world of teaching with Six Bricks!
FREE TO ALL PARTICIPANTS - Incredible Six Bricks for SEN Pack (Worth €30) - Sent by Post
NOTE:
The online format of this course enables you to study at a time and place that best suits your own needs.
You can access your course from July 1st to August 22nd 2025.
Within this highly interactive web-based course, a dynamic learning experience awaits, where you can interact with your fellow course participants through the in-course chat forums and communication tools provided by the CPD College learning system.
Our friendly and knowledgeable tutors actively support each course, providing expert interaction, guidance and feedback for all participants on chat questions and assignments which call for critical reflection, self-analysis and a reasoned response.
On successful completion of your course, you can download and print off your CPD record and certificate of completion.
We look forward to welcoming you to your course.
Learning outcomes
On completion of this course teachers will be able to:
- Contextual, itemise, incorporate and champion a Six Bricks approach to more effectively supporting children with special educational needs within curriculum
- Create and deploy Six Bricks activities to support the development, strengthening and progression of a vast range of perceptual skills, particularly for children with SEN
- Innovate and incorporate Six Bricks activities, pedagogy, principles and practices to support highly effective teacher practice for language and mathematics skills acquisition and development for all, but especially in SEN
- Productively and effectively incorporate Six Bricks into their mix of assessment approaches and practice
- Use and apply the range of Six Bricks materials, activities and approaches to support the holistic development, diverse needs and wellbeing of all children
- Innovate, design and create their own particular Six Bricks activities for the students they teach, that are child centered and needs based, using a suite of templates provided in the course
- Collaborate, evaluate and plan with SET colleagues to bring Six Bricks into their school and to embed them as a targeted measure to effectively support inclusive teaching, learning and assessment for all, but particularly for special educational needs
Modules
| 01 - Developing a range of key perceptual skills through Six Bricks activities: The overarching theme of this module is ‘Perceptual Skills Development’, a crucial area for many children with SEN. We focus in on a methodology that is sweeping the world of play & learning, that of ‘Six Bricks’. We present a cohort of wonderful activities that teachers can engage their students in, often using just six Duplo, 8-stud Lego Bricks, as they build and strengthen children’s full range of perceptual skills. We exemplar how Six Bricks are superb in SEN and include activities which: are open-ended, will allow the child to create or do something, will provide an opportunity for the child to co-operate with others, whilst keeping a sense of self, where the teacher can scale up or down, according to the level of the child and all will be fun, inspire laughter and a love of learning. Our 60+ Six Bricks activities in this module can be practised to develop the following sensory and perceptual skills in children, and can be differentiated further as required: Visual Spatial Perception to include: visual memory & discrimination; figure-ground perception; visual form constancy; visual closure; proprioception; spatial orientation & relationships Auditory discrimination & memory; tactile discrimination & memory. Gross & fine motor skills to include: : eye-hand co-ordination; body image; bilateral integration; crossing the midline; differentiation; laterality; dominance. We also detail utilising six bricks as a creative resource for implementing brain breaks for children with additional needs and utilising Six Bricks to support learners with autism (sensory breaks, visual supports for communication, structured play and learning, task focus and sequencing and calming area) Additionally, we detail, scope and provide activities for ‘Six Bricks Ice Breakers and Warm-Up Games that are inclusive of all. |
| 02 - Developing key mathematical ideas and skills with Six Bricks: We showcase how Six Bricks embodies a concrete, pictorial, abstract approach, or CPA approach to mathematics teaching, learning and assessment, as developed by American psychologist, Jerome Bruner. The process of development in children involves a need to classify what is going on around them and to identify patterns in what they experience. Children learn to fit things together and take them apart, as their spatial skills develop; they re-arrange and shape objects; they observe and describe things from different spatial views - this is something that can only be learned through experience. This is what our Six Bricks activities support. The manipulation of the concrete 6 Bricks in this section aims to exercise and consolidate: space, spatial relationships, shape, colour, classification • the awareness & concept of numbers, symbols, operations and relationships, one-to-one correspondence, seriation, estimation, counting, comparisons, patterns & algebra, directions, measurement, data handling and chance, problem solving. Our Six Bricks approach and activities will support children to develop their mathematical proficiency through engaging processes such as connecting, communicating, reasoning, justifying, representing, problem-solving and generalising, as they play, chat and work through a sequence of these 70+ teacher-led Six Bricks lessons and activities. Through a series of Six Bricks driven lesson plans, teachers will come to understand and know how to incorporate Six Bricks to support productive disposition, adaptive reasoning, procedural fluency and strategic competence as part of the PMC, together with how Six Bricks support a ‘Maths Talk’ approach. |
| 03 - Developing language skills with a Six Bricks approach: We focus on using just Six Bricks in all manner of creative ways to support the acquisition and development of language skills. We present enjoyable and motivating Six Bricks oral language stories and tasks that require SEN students to demonstrate joint attention, active listening and to attend & respond for a particular purpose, simply using combinations of Six Bricks. We present activities requiring children to demonstrate understanding through the ability to give and follow instructions incorporating Six Bricks, to show comprehension of texts like ‘Grobby Six Bricks – Farmyard Adventure’, that have been adapted to incorporate responding physically with Six Bricks. To support phonics, word recognition, and word study, we provide reams of hands-on Six Bricks activities & mats to support children to practice recognising, naming and sounding all 42-letter sounds of the letter sound code. We showcase how to practice blending with the bricks to work out words, and encoding to make words etc. (overlaying printed combinations of the letter sound code on the bricks). We present six bricks coded charts to practice identification of regular words, the 72 common tricky words, themed vocabulary etc. We present a selection of six words that are coded and projected in the colours of the 6 bricks and students must sequence them into a proper sentence using physical bricks. This has huge and unlimited application. We provide Six Bricks stories and comprehension activities which inspire students to write, illustrate and read/retell their own Grobby Six Bricks texts. We detail how to incorporate Six Bricks into existing written texts & own texts to support children to respond with a ‘brick’ or by ‘sequencing bricks’. We provide the Word Document templates for the letter sound code, Six Bricks adaptable PowerPoints to create their own activities and provide the links to the Six Bricks interactive digital activities. |
| 04 - Six Bricks as part of an effective and inclusive assessment mix: Through experiencing a broad range of great Six Bricks activities that are learner outcomes driven, teachers will come to know, understand, appreciate how Six Bricks can be made an effective part of the assessment cycle in all classrooms to support teaching, learning, assessment, SEN and inclusion. When learning tasks are designed around a child and his/her needs and incorporate a Six bricks approach, then teachers can use the bricks to revise old learning, deliver new learning, whilst assessing knowledge, understanding, skills and dispositions based on in-task observations as to how the bricks are being used, combined and applied. We showcase a variety of formal and informal assessment methods with Six Bricks for gathering information about children’s learning, ranging from child-led methods such as self-assessment and conferencing, to teacher-led methods such as teacher-designed tasks and tests. Six Bricks answer code assessments can be created for and coded into all 5 strands of the PMC to support concept acquisition, application, practice and assessment. We show how six bricks in tandem with coded wall charts can support great mental arithmetic and problem solving by all across all areas of number. We provide the master PowerPoint templates to support assessment codes and output of same through the IWB. We showcase how Six Bricks dovetail into the PLC and support active & visible assessment of their letter sound code knowledge, word reading by blending, identifying tricky words, comprehension skills, spelling, sentence building e.g. sequencing 6 coloured words into a proper sentence using their Six Bricks, etc. We share lots of examples, in the process, skilling and equipping teachers to create their own targeted assessments for their students with special educational needs. |
| 05 - Six Bricks activities to support the physical, social, emotional and wellbeing of all through group games and activities: We explore reams of Six Bricks themed activities that teachers can use as are, add to, extend, adapt or differentiate to best support the teaching, learning, assessment and wellbeing needs of students with SEN, together with their peers. Physical Skills Development: Children have a natural urge to be physically active and learn through physical experiences, a ‘Total Physical Response’ approach. Our Six Bricks activities provide children with many sensory-motor & fine / gross motor experiences they constantly need e.g. activities to help improve muscle tone, balance, proprioception, kinesthetic memory, hand-eye co-ordination etc. We champion Six Bricks in SEN as a way to develop the whole child - the thinking, feeling, moving child! Social-Emotional Skills Development: Cognitive, motor and language development will all be greatly affected by how a child feels about him / herself, and by how he / she can express emotions. The Six Bricks activities in this section aim to contribute to the child’s: self-confidence; self-esteem; empathy; respect; their ability to develop meaningful and lasting friendships and relationships; ability to experience, manage and express emotions; ability to make choices; solve problems etc. Groups and Games: Belonging to a group is important to young children. When they enter group settings, they are exposed to behaviour, social rules and attitudes that improve social development - all of this is best learned through playing with other children. Our Six Bricks activities support children to practise important social skills, such as: learning ways to co-operate; disagree; share; communicate; assert themselves effectively; accept others’ ideas; to express and manage their own feelings in appropriate ways; “read” social situations; control impulses; to compromise. |
We are delighted to bring you this course in collaboration with Brent Hutcheson and his organisation Care for Education, who have developed the Six Bricks pedagogy with the support of the LEGO® Foundation.
Check out our dedicated Six Bricks site at https://sixbrickseducation.com/ From here you can access the Six Bricks Interactive Whiteboard Software and the Six Bricks Shop.