MLK Day and Character Traits

Hello all!

I don't know about you, but my kiddos are CRAZY right now! I have never had behavior problems with this class before and they are driving me bonkers. Hopefully this extra day off will have them coming back relaxed and ready to LISTEN and learn :)

Speaking of our wonderful day off yesterday, I took the opportunity to get my favorite activities ready to teach about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I really enjoy teaching my students about him because his message is s important!

My absolute favorite activity to do on MLK Day is one with food. (Can you say engaging?) I choose a physical characteristic of certain students in my class. This year, I chose students that were under 40 inches tall (which happened to be 4 of my kiddos).

These 4 kids got this!

 

Needless to say, the rest of my class's jaws were down to the floor. I heard so many "That's not fair!" and "Why are they the only ones who get that?" I look at them very confused and tell them that students who are under a certain height get the MnM's and the others do not because they are too tall. That's just the way  that it is, and I don't know why they would be upset about that.

One student shouted out (it's like I can telepathically transfer my thoughts to their brain): "That's not right. I can't change how tall I am. Why am I being left out of the fun just because I'm too tall? I can't shrink." Genius child. I think so :)

Then we can get into our discussion of how it is unfair to leave someone out when the thing that is keeping them "out," is not something they can change about themselves.

We answered the questions:
1. Why is this unfair?
2. How does it make you feel?
3. What can you change?

Finally after all of this, I read this book below.

My favorite book to read first is Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I posted about this book last January, but it is so awesome I had to post about it again! This book has such an awesome way of helping the kiddos understand what the words in Dr. Martin Luther King's dream was all about!

Since we are working on understanding character traits, (that differ from character feelings) we made an anchor chart displaying all of Dr. King's traits. I do realize that MLK is not a "character," but he worked well for the skill I am trying to teach my students! We are also really big on providing "evidence" for our thoughts, so for each trait, we thought of 1-2 pieces of evidence to support it.

Horrible picture! But you get the idea :)

Then, we discussed the importance of his words. I posted different parts of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and the students had to pick the words that meant the most to them, and how they could show what these special words mean today!

This is the paper my students filled out. You can get it on Googledocs here. These are some examples that my kiddos did!

 

I wish I could have talked about MLK all day! The kiddos were so interested!

 

 

Enjoy the rest of your week! Only 3 days left :)

Sarah

I know I'm way late but.....MLK fun!

I have to get better about posting more often. It seems like I'll post everyday for a few days and then I won't at all for a month. I guess that's the life of a first year teacher! I can only do what I can do!

I'll start with MLK. We did an awesome study of Martin Luthe King Jr. and his life. The kids were absolutely fascinated! My school is not very diverse, and my students could not believe what it would be like to live in a world where everyone wasn't treated fairly. So I did a little activity. Out of my 15 students, I picked out a physical trait that only a few of them had, that cannot be changed....dark brown eyes. I did not tell the students what the trait was, but picked out these three students and gave them a giant bag of candy and told them to go wild. Needless to say the other students' mouths were watering.

They soon figured out that the reason these students got the candy was because they had dark brown eyes, and were all complaining to me that it wasn't fair that these students got all this candy and they didn't. I asked them if eye color is something that they can change about themselves. They said no, and pouted about not getting any candy ;). I told them that this was what MLK was fighting for. White people and African-American people could not change their skin color, and they were treated differently despite that. The kids TOTALLY got it! I was so thrilled and it was a great introduction to MLK and his dream.

We read Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is the best picture book I have ever read about MLK. It included every important fact about his life, but the history was totally understandable for my students. We also watched the movie version of this book on Discovery Education (the most awesome website ever created).

I used Erin Eberhart's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mini Unit that I downloaded for FREE on TPT! After we read Martin's Big Words, we created her tree map activity. We completed her "I Have A Dream" writing activity. They loved it! They had so much fun with his unit!

We had a great week of learning about a staple in US history!