Honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Your Classroom
from INBOX 1-10-06

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 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).

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 01-10-06.