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.

Learning About Windmills - STEM fun!

One of my fellow teachers and I have been taking a STEM class to help us integrate STEM into our curriculum.  As part of our class, we have been very lucky to receive a variety of resources, but our favorite so far has been a KidWind kit!

With the kit, our students have been able to design their own windmills with the following purposes:

1. A design that will lift the most weight.
2. A design that will create enough power (electricity) to turn on a small light bulb.

We started our lesson by allowing the students to play with the kits, designing windmills as they built them.

As they watched each team try out their designs, they made lots of observations and developed several theories.

Once they tested a few out, it was time to plan some re-design based on the observations they had made the day before.

I loved how some of the students used tools we had used in previous lessons (rulers and using centimeters) as they wrote out their plans.

Some used prior knowledge.

Here is a video of some of our students lifting washers with their windmill:


Our winning engineers who lifted the most weight.  They were so proud!

Here are some students creating electricity with their windmills.

You can order these kits here (you could also use it as a Donors Choose project!).  Or you could try to make a similar kit to the one shown below.  Our instructors from the STEM class ran our school's science night and brought these versions with them. They used wood dowels, closet rod, PVC pipe, swimming “noodles” cut 3 inches wide, a washer, and hot glue to make them.  

They poked barbecue skewers into the pool noodle and taped paper plates to them to make their windmill panels.

Have you integrated STEM into your classroom?  I'd love to hear what you've done!  If you have a blog post about it, be sure to leave a link in the comments below.

First Few Days Back - Reviewing Expectations and Re-Building Daily 5 Stamina

Well, I have survived the first two days back after vacation!  They haven't been bad, but I have been exhausted after resting for two weeks straight.  The behavior has been amazing so far (knock on wood) and may be due in part to the fact that I planned to review expectations and re-build Daily 5 stamina this week.  Just like the first week of school we have been reviewing and practicing.  I started with a True/False PowerPoint review of our rules.

You can download this freebie at Teachers Pay Teachers here.

Even if you have already gone back to school you can pin it and save it for next year : D.  It is fully editable.

Then, we practiced building up our Daily 5 stamina.  We reviewed the expectations and wrote them on the board.  Then we practiced just like the beginning of the year with me calling them back to the carpet as soon as one person was off task.

(ignore my messy handwriting!)

I am not going to lie - it was a little ugly the first day - our best time (not shown) was a little over 9 minutes.  Luckily, by day 2 we were back on track.

23 minutes - can I get a woot woot?

Ahhhh!  Daily 5 Bliss - ready for me to work with small groups and meet for individual conferences!  A few days of reinforcing those expectations is so worth it!  What have you done to reinforce expectations since you have gone back to school?

Teaching Subjects and Predicates With Mr. Morton - FREEBIE

‘Mr Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says he does.’

That song is ingrained in my brain after I used the Grammar Rock anthem to teach some of my kiddos about subjects and predicates.  Several of them were having difficulty with  writing complete sentences, and most of them were thrown into a tizzy when we were working on some of Jivey's amazing grammar lessons when they were asked to identify the subject and predicate in her mentor sentences.

So... a mini-lesson was in order.

First we watched the video:

Then we practiced identifying the subject and the predicate in the sentences from the video. They really got it after I modeled a few of the sentences.

I also found this picture from Doxie House that I will definitely incorporate next year or if I have a few strugglers.

I made a free worksheet for you to use with your students if you would like.  You can download it here. 

While you are there, be sure to follow me on Teachers Pay Teachers for the chance to win a $25 TpT gift certificate :D

Failing to Plan is Planning To Fail - Creating Your Long Term Plans for the School Year

 

 

You have probably heard this adage a time or two, but have you ever followed it?  This will be the second year in a row that I am switching grades (last year I switched from 7th grade math to 3rd grade and this year I am moving up to 4th), and I don't want to feel like I don't know where I'm going.  So, I used the curriculum map we have from our school district, and added the things that aren't there (science, social studies, grammar, and writing) to create a set of Long-Term plans for the year.  Even if I don't stick to it 100%, I feel better having a plan to cover everything I need to during the year.

 

 

It didn't print out 100% perfectly, but since I' m the one who is using it, I'm ok with that.  If any of you know how to fix it, I'm all ears :)

 

I have put the plans in the back of my lesson planning notebook for future reference as I start working on individual units.  The front of my lesson plan book is for my weekly plans and monthly calendars where I will list out everything including special events, assemblies, etc.

 

I will be sharing my complete book in a little bit - I bought the Staples Circa I had my eye on and am working on customizing it to fit for me. 

 

I have uploaded the Excel version of this document so that you can edit it and use it if you would like - setting it up took forever, so I thought I would save you some time. It is a freebie, and all you have to do to get it is to like my Facebook page here.  It is in the Facebook Fan Freebie tab.

 

Do you make long term plans?



Learning About Frogs - Carousel

We are beginning a research/non-fiction unit on frogs (since we will be getting a class pet soon!). Before I told the kiddos what the unit was about (and what pet we were going to get), I had them complete a carousel activity.  I set up 6 stations around the room with pictures and chart paper. The chart paper was pre-labeled with "What I Notice" and "What I Wonder".

The students worked in groups of 3 and had 3 minutes at each station to talk about what they noticed.  Each group had a different colored marker and wrote down some of their observations and questions.

It was really fun to see what things they noticed (and what things grossed them out!). It was a great way to introduce the unit and get their brains engaged.  They did eventually guess that we would be learning about frogs.

I am working on the complete unit as they work on it, but I will eventually post the final unit to TpT when it is done.  In the meantime, you might want to check out my Can We Get a Pet Unit which kicked off the whole project you see here!

Have you used a carousel in class before? What other engagement ideas do you use?