Journey - Trouble on the Road

• Review this lesson plan and choose what you need from the Teacher Support box.

• If necessary, pre-teach these related vocabulary words: remind, police officer, traffic sign, potential, avoid.

• Consider the abilities and backgrounds of all your students and decide when and how to introduce and differentiate lesson content, activities, or concepts.

• This lesson is designed to be used with the Coding Express app. Download the app for student devices at legoeducation.com/downloads.

• To use this lesson without the Coding Express app, see the unplugged version.

• Talk to the students about traffic rules.

• Ask questions like:

  • Do you know any traffic rules? What are they?
  • Why do we need to follow traffic rules?

• Tell the students that everybody needs to follow the traffic rules.

• Explain that traffic signs are one way of reminding people of the rules.

• Show the four traffic signs from the set and ask the students if they can guess what they mean.

• Tell them they’re going to play a game!

• Place the traffic signs around the classroom and ask the students to pretend they’re each driving their own high-speed train.

• Explain that they should slow down or stop when approaching marked areas.

• Act as a police officer controlling the flow of traffic, or ask one of the students to do it.

• Have each group of students pick a building card and build the model shown.

• Have the students work together to build a Y-shaped track and place their models alongside it.

• Place the action bricks in random places along the track.

• Now experiment with the app.

• Put the train on the track and allow the students to explore the different functions of each button.

• Let’s start the train!

• Have the students take turns using the app to “drive” the train.

• What happens after the train passes each action brick?

• Talk to the students about the problems they’ve seen in the app.

• Ask questions like:

  • What did you see after the train passed each stop?
  • How will you solve the problem?
  • Which traffic sign do you need in order to solve each problem?

• Encourage the students to play and to use all of the traffic signs.

• Ask if they can think of any other important things to keep in mind in order to stay safe in traffic.

• Encourage the students to create their own traffic signs or models to help keep them safe in traffic.

• Have them place their creations along the track and explain why they placed them where they did.

• Ask guiding questions to elicit students’ thinking and their decisions while ideating, building, and programming.

Observation Checklist

• Review the learning objectives and educational standards addressed in this lesson (Teacher Support box).

• Share specific student responses and behaviors at different levels of mastery.

• Use the following checklist to observe students’ progress:

  • Students can create a y-shaped track and use it to describe the journey the train is taking.
  • Students can use their models to add additional details to their descriptions of the journey.
  • Students can describe, with prompting, the repeating sequence of events on the trip.

• Use this lesson’s format to create lessons for the Passengers and the Four Seasons in the app.

• In the Engage phase, talk about the passengers’ accessories and how the seasons should look; explore more interesting destinations with your kindergarteners.