Lego Hearts for Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day! Is there a greater language of love than maths? Well, we may be a bit biased. But there's plenty of maths involved in our fun Valentines Day Lego hearts. So what are you waiting for - raid your Lego box, and get building!

To build our original Lego heart, you will need 27 Lego bricks that measure 2x2. Ask your child to count out the bricks before they start. Can they figure out how to put the bricks together to recreate the heart shape? If the video is too fast for you, you can follow the image below as guide.

If you don't have enough 2x2 bricks, you can use other bricks instead, e.g. in some of the other hearts we made we used 2x3 and 2x4 bricks. How many bricks will you need if you change the size of brick you are using? How do you need to fit them together so that the heart doesn't fall apart?

To add some more maths in to the mix, use different coloured bricks and challenge your child to create some repeating colour patterns when they are building their hearts. Can you spot three different patterns in the image below?

Did you find all the patterns?

• The hearts in the top row both use two alternating colours.
• The hearts in the bottom row use three and four colours, which repeat in the same order.

If you make lots of hearts, you can fit them together to create an even bigger pattern. Here's how we did it:

This is called tessellation. Simply put, tessellations are arrangements of shapes closely fitted together, in a repeated pattern without gaps or overlapping. Often, you'll see tessellation patterns made from polygons, but other shapes can fit together in tessellations too.