Martin Luther King Jr. Lesson Plan Ideas and FREEBIES

Whether you have to work tomorrow or have the day off in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., chances are that you might want to teach your students a little more about the man and his accomplishments.  Here are a few resources and freebies to help you with your lesson planning this week:

Panicked Teacher has this poem and close reading activity all about Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 I had blogged about this mobile we made last week.  It is a freebie from Scholastic.

   

Laura Candler has this amazing packet full of activities to go along with the Martin Luther King Jr. Brain Pop video.

Here is a lesson plan to go along with the book Martin's Big Words.



Your students can create a Martin Luther King timeline of his important accomplishments with this idea from Crayola.

I also have a ton of other ideas pinned on my Pinterest board below.  If you like the ideas, please be sure to follow me on Pinterest for even more ideas and resources!


Follow Kelly's board Holidays in the Classroom - Martin Luther King on Pinterest.

Martin Luther King Timeline and Writing Activity

Like many classes across the US we have been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. this week. Yesterday we read Martin's Big Words by Doreen Rappaport.  Then I gave the students copies of the important dates and asked them to choose the four that they thought were most important in describing why we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. I thought it might give them a little practice in picking out main ideas as we seem to still struggle a bit with this skill.

The students colored in pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and pasted them to the beginning of their paper.  They drew a timeline across and used speech bubbles to write down the events they chose.  Here is what the final product looked like:

Today we worked on our essays comparing our dreams to Martin Luther King Jr.'s dreams. We started with a graphic organizer that looked like this:

Then I asked the students to brainstorm the dreams that they had for their school, their community, and the World.  This is what they came up with:

You can tell that some of their dreams are related to recent news events :(

We used the brainstorms to write a paragraph about each of these dreams.  After the students wrote about their own dreams, we went to the computer lab to research Martin Luther King Jr.'s dreams.  They wrote a paragraph about what they found.  We put the two together for a cute craftivity.