Ozosquad, you inspire us and we’re grateful for you—every day, but especially as we reflect close to Thanksgiving! Last year, so many of you shared your Balloons Over Broadway parades and they looked like SO MUCH FUN. This year, we want even more people to get in on the fun and show our appreciation with a Thanksgiving Day Parade Float Contest!
Contests mean prizes, so we will be selecting 3 winners to receive Evos!
- Evo for Home (Evo + Color Code Markers– $100 value) to two lucky winners &
- Evo Educator Prize Pack (Three Evo Educator Entry Kits– $297 value) to the winning school.
Your floats do not need to incorporate balloons—it can be whatever you dream up! Here are some more ideas. The Thanksgiving Day parade has lots of cool balloons, like in the book, but it has all kinds of other floats as well.
Don’t have an Evo yet? No problem! You can get creative with drawings, graphics, or whatever you can think of to show us what your Ozobot parade float would look like if you had one.
See how to enter (and get inspired) below!
While we can’t pinpoint the exact originator of this amazing Balloons Over Broadway activity, and we suspect that a lot of you amazing educators were struck with inspiration after reading the book. But we have a good idea of some of the people that got the word out and showed everyone how easy it can be to STEAM power ELA!
The Original Post
Back in 2017, Katie Kemp shared her proud students showing off their super-creative floats, made with popsicle sticks and construction paper!
The Lesson
Last year, Mary Catherine Coleman shared her Balloons Over the Library lesson with us in our Lesson Library after her viral Twitter video of her students showing off their balloon floats! To be honest, before that video, we thought helium-filled balloons would carry Ozobot away!
Balloons Over Broadway + VR
Librarian Extraordinaire, Shannon McClintock Miller, shared that her students would be completing visiting the Macy’s Day parade using Merge VR, then create parade floats for their Ozobots.
We had to do a double-take to make sure we weren’t looking at the actual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade when we saw this post! Mrs. Rosario’s fourth graders really nailed the vibe of the real thing with their intricate balloon floats.
Balloons As a Canvas
We loved how the students in Mr. Davola’s class had so many creative uses for their balloon floats (check out the balloon ice cream cone!).
Break Out the Butcher Paper!
When you work so hard engineering your float, you want to see it in action! We love that these students cleared some floor space to create a long parade route for their floats AND infused coding into Language Arts.
All Out
The students in Mr. Nolan’s class constructed not only their parade floats, but also buildings on their parade route for a completely 3D parade experience!
