Have you read "Fly!" yet?? It's hilarious and adorable and, in my opinion, one of the stronger Mock Caldecott picks we've got. It's also a wordless picture book, which fourth graders in my library don't get to see too much, so it was fun to read with them! We read most of the book, which shows through pictures and speech bubbles the battle between a baby bird and his mother when he falls out of the nest. His mother's insistence that he is unsafe because of owls and cats and dogs, as well as an argument that he needs to learn to fly so he can migrate to Florida for the winter, is met with comical suggestions for other methods of transportation: a snowboard jump, a convertible, a train. The kids loved it.Then we posed our question: How can we help the baby bird get to Florida, if he doesn't learn to fly?
Because we're starting a Scratch project in the next few weeks, I wanted them to get more familiar with block coding. So, we pulled out the Ozobots - but not the markers! (This was VERY upsetting to them at first - the color coding is DEFINITELY preferred!) They used OzoBlockly to program the "baby bird" from his nest to Florida. I put a dog, cat, and owl in the way to be obstacles, but I learned from a previous lesson in OzoBlockly and didn't make it too tricky. The pictures were just photographs of pages of the book, printed out and taped on white butcher paper so Ozobot wouldn't get confused by the grains in the table.
The kids had a great time and were mostly able to get him from here to there! We did have to discuss the importance of including loops - I learned that lesson last time: The less code, the less time it takes to load!
After all that, the kids saw the last few pages of the story, in which the bird's mother leaves, causing him to panic and - gasp - fly! They pretty much agreed that going in an Ozobot is a preferable mode of travel.
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