Peek at my Week: Dr. King

It's time to learn all about a great American, Martin Luther King, Jr. After a peek at my week, I shared a few of our favorite activities to celebrate this famous hero.

Here’s a little peek at our week. You can download the plans (here). We are going to continue talking about winter and add in our unit of study on MLK.
We can’t wait to get into our Non Fiction Writing Unit. We have focused on non fiction text during our guided reading. We have loved using the various levels of text---with the same content and the same non fiction features.
We want all kids to see themselves as writers---so what a perfect connection. It doesn’t matter the level of the text they write, if they only use illustrations or if they write full paragraphs, they can still develop the concepts of non fiction text! Wow! That is pretty powerful! So…your children can master the writing standard without writing text? The writing standards require the children to know the features of the genre.  Now, don’t get me wrong. They do HAVE to write text to accomplish the foundational standards—stretching words, spacing, letter formation, etc.

We are going to spend Monday reading lots of books about Dr. King.

Then, the rest of the week we are going to put that information to work-writing non fiction text, making connections, and learning about cause and effect.

During math we are moving on to Unit 5—Number Combinations 6-10.  I have a very smart friend, Catherine Kuhns. When I have a math question, I give her a call. So this past week we were having a discussion and it came up again about number combinations. She said, “According to the NCTM, kids need to see multiple representation for each number. They need to break it apart and put it back together in many different combinations.” So, that said—here’s what I think. SLOW DOWN!!!! If we can have children confident, fluent, and able to draw on mental images for each number---it will pay off big time in the long run. Be sure and check out Catherine’s resources. She is pretty fabulous!

Here are a few ideas from last year when we celebrated Dr. King. Many of these ideas are in our plans this week. These ideas are from Hooray for Dr. King Day.


Dr. King had 4 children. For this activity, we had the children show different combinations of 4 children.

For this activity we learned all about Rosa Parks and her bus ride. For this math activity, the children show how to get the kids on the bus so that they are sharing the seats equally.

For this activity we wanted to show the kids how we can share and get along, just like Dr. King wanted us to.  In this story problem the children had to figure out how to share the toys when there isn't enough for everyone to have their own.

Dr. King wanted us to know that the color of our skin did not determine our worth. For this activity we made patterns and joined hands together!

For this fun cheer, the kids sorted pictures by beginning sound.

For this activity we visited the cause and effect of Dr. King's Work.

We made a birthday cake for Dr. King. The children cut apart the sentences and the words to Happy Birthday song. They used patterns to decorate their cakes.

We made our own Dr. King and wrote about all the things we learned about Dr. King.
Be sure and hop over to my friend Deedee’s blog to see what others are doing this week.