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While studying World War II, my kids built some LEGO tanks! They had such a fun time looking at pictures of tanks and trying to get the correct shape. The tops of the tanks swivel, as you can see in the YouTube demonstration below. The green tank has a hatch where soldiers can enter the tank. If you have Robotic LEGOs, you can use the track for the bottom of the tank. If all you have is regular LEGOs, you can make a track like the green tank, using black LEGOs.
We are using All American History, Volume II this year for our American History studies. We also read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom to further understand the Holocaust of World War II.
Besides LEGO tanks, you can also make other LEGO scenes from World War II. During the Blitzkrieg in London, the German planes dropped bombs on the city, demolishing the entire city and leaving it in ruins. As you can see in the YouTube video, the airplanes are 3-dimensional, coming out from the scene, dropping their bombs behind them. The white buildings have black smoke rising from them.
My son decided to make a LEGO atomic mushroom cloud out of white LEGO bricks. Just look at a photo of an atomic explosion, and you will see how to construct the mushroom cloud. There is a larger mushroom top and a smaller mushroom top about half-way down, tapering sort of like stair steps.
My daughter made a concentration camp out of a LEGO base that was gray. There was a gas chamber in one corner. A LEGO man is beating a couple of Jews, and two more men are shooting two other prisoners.
Here is the video demonstration where I show you our World War II LEGO creations:
Making scenes out of LEGO bricks will help kids to understand World War II while creating from their imaginations. The LEGO tanks were especially fun to make!
Tags: All American History: Vol. 2, history, Homeschooling, LEGO, modern history, tanks, weapons, World War II
Hey. Saw the top photo when passing by looking for a new WW2 tank model to build. I believe the yellow is an M3 Lee or a M3 Grant, The level of detail is not enough to tell. And the Green one looks like a M4 Sherman. Again, there inst enough detail to tell! But for your kids to build iconic tanks like that, that’s awesome! In the future, they could make tanks pro like me. And its cool to see kids studding a subject not many parents go into because of its dark past. Hope to see more cool WW2 models like these in the future!
-Ben, WWII Historian
Glad you can identify our tanks! Cool!
A concentration camp, think it’s fine to build tanks and what not, but that aspect of history is just a little deep and sad especially with the mentioning of the gas chamber with dead people in it.
We read the book “The Hiding Place” and cried when we experienced through the book how horrific the Holocaust was. May we never forget to never repeat it. Kids need to learn about this so that they understand the levels of human depravity and not be so trusting that people are intrinsically good, which they are not.
Hey, I think you deleted my original post on the concentration camp and I feel as if it’s a sensitive subject that is really sad. I’m just saying, I don’t think you should be building that kind of stuff, as it may be offensive.
I have visited a concentration camp in Germany, and it truly was horrific. All students should learn about history so that we are not doomed to repeat it.
Oops, sorry my bad, you did not delete my first post.
And you talk about it so lightly!
No, I’m just mentioning hands-on activities so that kids can internalize and understand the horrific nature of that time period, so that they never think that prejudice is okay. If we do not teach history the way it really was, we are doomed to repeat it.