The nickname for your first metres on the ice: short, choppy steps with your weight over the balls of your feet, still without any real glide phase.
Penguin steps sound like mockery but are exactly the right first stage: you shift your weight from blade to blade and find out where your balance even sits on a slippery surface. The typical mistake is skipping them and trying to glide straight away — your weight drifts back, the blades shoot out ahead, and the fall lands on your tailbone and the back of your head. So: knees clearly bent, weight slightly forward over the balls of your feet, eyes ahead rather than down at the ice. From there the order runs on to two-footed gliding, your first sideways push off the inside edge, and braking. What tends to get missed — before all of that comes deliberately practising falling and getting back up. Do it once under control and you tense up noticeably less afterwards, and it is that tension that produces the falls.