Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Lesson Ideas on Martin Luther King

We are talking about Martin Luther King this week on Wednesday because I am alternating Social Studies and Science every other day.  Tuesday we talked about Properties of Matter in Science. 

We will start our discussion on Martin Luther King by watching a video on MLK.  There are several good choices on Discovery Education.  There is also a free video with Brainpop.  I love the free videos on Brainpop because they come with little printable activities.

Tonight I ran to the library to find some books on the 13 Colonies and came across a graphic novel biography of MLK.  Thus, we will read this as a read aloud.  I love finding opportunities to use different mediums and genres of text. The name of the graphic novel is Martin Luther King, Jr.: Great Civil Rights Leader.

Source: amazon.com via April on Pinterest

We will also read a passage on Martin Luther King from Readworks.  Here are some different ones to choose from. Readworks has fabulous passages.  The passages usually are fairly short, but the questions are great.  It is an amazing free resource for extra nonfiction test practice or guided reading resources.

I was at a teaching workshop a couple years ago where the instructor took sections of the "I Have a Dream" speech and had them on notecards.  She handed out the sections to different groups, and we had to rewrite that section in our own words.  I think this is a fabulous idea, so we are going to do this as an analyzing and writing activity. Here is a link to a text copy of the speech.

My students will write sections of the speech in their own words.  I also pulled some quotes from Dr. King we will use for writing inspiration. We will break down the quotes and explain what they mean. Then, they can use the quotes to inspire their journal writing to write about whatever they want as long as it is inspired by the quote. I also will have my students write a paragraph about their own dreams for the world.  I ended up putting together a file with all of this. 

You can get it at my TpT store.  It will be on sale this week. The first person to leave me a comment with your favorite activity for learning about Martin Luther King can have a copy for free.


Jennifer Findley today shared a cute idea to work on Point of View in writing by looking at the Rosa Parks story.  We have been talking and talking about point of view, so I love this idea!  If I squeeze this next week, then we will use a Readworks passage.  Otherwise, we may use it for Black History month, and I will actually probably pick up some books at the library. Readworks has lesson ideas for using Rosa Parks: My Story.
Source: amazon.com via Jenna on Pinterest

1 comment:

  1. I just checked out readworks.org. It has some great passages. Thank you for sharing. I am teaching AIS this year so I have grades K-6. Looks like this will be a great resource!

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