Martin Luther King, Jr Day

It's so hard to believe we are already 2+ weeks into 2015!

 

Crazy!

 

And yay for a 3 day weekend!

 

I usually teach about MLK the week of MLK Day.

 

But this year, I did a quick poll of my kiddos to see who actually knew who Martin Luther King, Jr. was and why he was special enough to earn his own holiday.  And I got...

 

Crickets.

 

My kids had no clue.

 

So I decided to do a little teaching about Martin Luther King on the Friday before MLK Day this year.

 

First, we started off with my favorite MLK books.

 

I have several, but these are my favorites.

 

The book on the right goes quite in depth about the segregation when MLK was little.  But it kept the text short enough that my kids were totally interested and focused.

This year I added a little interactive book to my MLK teaching.

 

I whipped this up the last Sunday of Winter Break and am so pleased with it.

 

 

 

It's a little long, but there was just so much to say!

 

FYI - My kids told me MLK looked like Obama in this picture. LOL

 

I told them that was because this was a cartoon, the real MLK didn't look like Obama at all.

My kids LOVE these interactive readers. 

 

The first one we did was about Veteran's Day.  I bought it from TpT back in November for only $1!  Check it out here.

 

Like I did with the Veteran's Day reader, I cut apart the pieces before hand.  Then I read each page and passed out the correct piece while the kids colored.  This seems to work great for my kindergarteners because a few are always losing pieces when they cut and glue independent work.  But with this I wanted them to focus on the content, not if they could find the correct piece or not.

This sweet girl was like "Oh a calendar," and then she decided to fill it up with numbers. She actually refused to move on to the next page until she had filled up every box. 

 

I was so happy, because for quite awhile, this little one has had no interest in anything academic.  So the fact that she actually wanted to write numbers thrilled me.

 

Maybe next time we practice numbers I should give her a few pages with calendar clipart so she can fill all the boxes with numbers.

Oh how I love my glue sponges!

 

I will do a blog post on these soon.  But they are so wonderful!

 

I love that I don't have to hear: "My gluestick is broken," "My gluestick is dried out," "I can't find my gluestick," "She stole my gluestick," etc.

 

We just keep these babies stacked in the middle of each table, two per table, and when we glue, they know who to share with and what to do.

 

No fussing!

After we filled in all the blanks, we wrote out what we have a dream about.

While the kids were occupied writing, I typed in "Martin Luther King, Jr speech" in google search and a video came right up.

 

So we watched a minute or so of his famous "I have a dream" speech.

My kids were totally into it!

 

Some of my kids asked if all the people and clothes really looked like that back then (black and white, no colors), so we had a quick classroom discussion about it.  We talked about how this video was from a long time ago where they could only record in black and white. 

 



I love this one!

 

"I have a dream that we always share all the time."

 

She is such a sweet heart!

 

And I love that all has 4 letter Ls.

And then of course we have random sight words. 

 

So this little one and I had a quick talk about how I was glad she was writing words, but writing a sentence means you are actually telling or asking something, not writing down random words from the word wall.

 

Oh my!

 



So sweet!  And I love her picture!

 

"I have a dream that I would see God."



This was mine.

 

Hehe!

 

My kids thought it was hilarious.

 

I hope everyone has an awesome MLK Day!