After reading the story, we did a little intro to coding with an unplugged coding activity - Hopscotch Coding. I thought this would be a great way to get them up and moving and understanding that robots (like our mouse) only follow the directions that they are given. I started out by making a path for students to follow and then when they got the hang of it, I let them take over! I separated the class into two groups and gave each group an envelope with direction cards. They had to put together a code/path, test it, and then I would follow it to make sure their directions followed their intended path. We had to do some debugging on their code, but we eventually got them working properly!
We started out by building their workspace. I know that the mice can be used without the green squares they come with, but I wanted the students to build the workspace to understand the limits we were working with (4 x 4). I think this helped them understand that you can't push forward more than four times as it would go off the workspace. After that, we went over the functions of the mice. I had printed off the two sheets below and clipped them to the board so that they could reference any of my directions at any time.
I had taken pictures of key parts in the story and put some of the story parts with them so the students could remember what happened in that point in the story. I had printed these out and put them up on the board as well. I had also printed out small squares of these story points and gave each group a bag with the story parts. They had to find the matching story parts that I had, match them to where I placed them on the workspace, and then code the directions from Start, to story part, to Stop.