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Honor Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. in Your Classroom
The ReadWriteThink lesson plan Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Me: Identifying with a Hero (E) provides lots of
ideas by encouraging students to explore the connections between King and
themselves in journals and inquiry-based research.
For a follow-up, try the Living
the Dream: 100 Acts of Kindness (E) or How
Big Are Martin's Big Words? Thinking Big about the Future (E), both lessons
from ReadWriteThink.
Read “Parents
and Children Inquiring Together: Written Conversations about Social Justice” (E) from Language Arts for
techniques to use written conversations as a powerful means of inviting discussions between parents and children about critical
issues and human rights.
In the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Every
Punctuation Mark Matters: A Mini-Lesson on Semicolons (M-S),
students first explore King's use of semicolons and
their rhetorical significance in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" then
apply the lesson to their own writing.
Encourage your students to explore the ways that passionate
words communicate the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination, and
the American Dream in King’s "I Have a Dream" speech
with the ReadWriteThink lesson Exploring
the Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, Words through Diamante Poetry (S).
For more details on the ways that King's word choice shapes his message,
consider the Teaching English in the Two-Year College “Using “I
Have a Dream” to Teach Strong Repetition (What
Works for Me)” (S-C).
In "Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s, 'I Have a Dream' in Context: Ceremonial Protest and African
American Jeremiad" (C) from College English, King's "I
Have a Dream" is presented as the product of African American
rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals
that had crystallized long before King was born.
See the ReadWriteThink calendar entry for King's
birthday for additional
online resources. Additionally, check out the NCTE title A
Curriculum of Peace: Selected Essays from
English Journal (M-S)
includes “Giving
Peace a Chance: Gandhi and King in the English Classroom” (S), which
describes
how one high school English teacher developed and taught a unit that would
give students the opportunity to see how violence and nonviolence affects their
lives.
NOTE: Free access to journal articles mentioned in this Inbox is provided
for 21 days. After this free access period expires, articles are available
to journal subscribers only. This Inbox Idea was published 1-11-05.
Initials in annotations indicate academic level of the resource (E=Elementary,
M=Middle, S=Secondary, C=College, G=General).
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