Playing LEGOs With Sean Kenney

Sean playing with someone's creation

How do you make 300 kids happy? Dump out 50,000 LEGO pieces to play with and introduce them to one of only 9 Certified LEGO Professionals in the world. Judging from the faces at the Riverview School gym yesterday,  I would say that that formula worked quite well!

Certified LEGO Professional Sean Kenney (and his very nice wife Lily) came to the Cape to talk about his book Cool Cars and Trucks. The book gives kids ideas of things to build with their existing LEGO pieces.  Sean brought with him some

LEGO sculptures that he made (including a human head!) and the aforementioned 50,000 LEGO pieces.After a very quick introduction and talk, kids gathered around tables piled with LEGO pieces and created the most amazing things. Once they had built something that they were proud of, they patiently stood in line to show Sean their creation and have him sign their book.

After basically never leaving Sean’s side for 5 hours, I can tell you emphatically that this is a man who LOVES his work and LOVES working with kids. He carefully examined each piece presented to him by all of the children asking them “what’s the name of this?”, “what does

Lily Kenney shows the kids that the car is shallow...think she's having fun?

this do?”, or  “which car do you think goes the fastest?”. Kids carefully described their creation and told him why this piece went here or how that piece works. Honestly at times I thought I was working with a 9 year old when he began driving LEGO trucks around the signing table with a convincing “vroom….grrrr…..beeeeeppp”. You could see it in the kids eyes that they had met someone that they could totally relate to!

What was even greater was the overall message that Sean brought with him. Follow your dream! Do what you love and don’t give up. Here was a guy that just decided to stop working in an office and start doing what he loved, building with LEGOs. He essentially created his own job by demonstrating his creativity with LEGO bricks. I think that the kids that came will never forget that message….how cool is that?

What a cool thing to watch 100 kids playing with LEGOs together

The Hall of Fame table...kids brought their creations to the Hall of Fame to show Sean

Our own Vicky introducing Sean..just about to tell those kids to invade the tables with LEGOs

About these ads