Think back over these chapters. On a windy meadow, a young goose runs, flaps, stumbles, runs again — while a flock calls instructions and a metal mother counts wingbeats she will never make. One day the running becomes rising, and the island tilts below him. Elsewhere, fury on four legs collides with patience on two, and when the roaring stops, the patient one stands winner — minus a foot. Then sawdust, measuring, whittling: a beaver at his bench, building an ankle. The robot walks home on a piece of the island.

A bird’s first flight looks like magic — but it is homework. Young birds spend weeks preparing in a stage scientists call fledging: the period when a chick grows flight feathers and works up to leaving the nest. The training plan is surprisingly ordinary. First comes muscle: flightless days of vigorous wing-flapping — exercise, not failure — that builds the powerful chest muscles flight demands. Then come hops, then flapping leaps, then short ‘flights’ that are mostly falling with style. Waterfowl like geese add a special skill: the running takeoff, sprinting across water or ground, wings beating, until speed and lift agree to carry them.

Parents teach mostly by demonstration — flying short hops, circling back, calling encouragement — because flight cannot be explained, only shown and tried. The hardest lesson comes last: landing, which young birds famously flub, skidding, tumbling, and overshooting until practice smooths the crashes out. Ornithologists note that fledglings learn fastest in groups, where each youngster copies the boldest — a flock is a flying classroom. All of which explains the strangest flight school in children’s literature: a flightless robot mother who supplies the plan and the cheering, and borrows a flock to supply the wings. The method is fiction. The curriculum is real.

No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.