Meaningful martin luther king jr craft and activities for 1st Grade

This week in first grade we have been researching and learning about Martin Luther King, Jr to prepare for his upcoming holiday.  I loved spending time learning about him and doing a Martin Luther King Jr craft for our hallway display right after our New Year dreams we wrote our first week back from break!  The connection between our New Year’s resolutions and Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech was just perfect!

If you use my 1st Grade Common Core Units, you may be wondering why I’m teaching Martin Luther King, Jr. now and not with Unit 5: American Contributors later in the spring…and the answer is simple… I just like the way the American Contributors unit fits in January and February.  It ties in with MLK day, with Presidents’ Day, and with black history month! So, I flipped the American Contributors Unit and the 1st Grade Weather Unit and did Famous People in January and February and started weather in March–which worked so perfectly!

So, I was super excited to start our Bright Ideas unit this week!

Identifying Key Details about MLK

We started off by reading resources and gathering facts about Martin Luther King, Jr.  I **LOVED** using Google Docs for this and integrating technology this way.  The kids were engaged and loved watching me type and it definitely saved anchor chart space!

We read 3 different sources, the (amazing) book, Martin’s Big Words, a Reading Rainbow clip about MLK and a pebble go article on him.  We added an * beside each fact when we heard it again from another source.  So, two stars by a fact means we heard it two more times after the original time.

Since we would be talking about choosing important vs interesting details the next day, knowing which facts we heard over and over about Martin Luther King, Jr. would be important!

The next day, we reviewed our facts and talked about what his bright idea was–what was his main contribution that made our lives better?  We charted his bright idea on our group charts {each group is named for an American Contributor}.

Bright Ideas Booklet for Famous People

Then, students recorded Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea in their “Who Had a Bright Idea?” booklet that we will use during the entire unit to record our contributors we study.

“He fought peacefully for equal rights.”

Look how this cutie copied my ….. underlines for the word peacefully. Little eyes don’t miss anything, do they!

Identifying the Most Important Facts

In reading that day, we discussed filtering through facts to choose the *important* facts.  We highlighted our important facts about Martin Luther King, Jr. in blue!

We charted our important facts on this Martin Luther King, Jr. anchor chart for future reference! (But thankfully, it could be much smaller since we’d filtered through our facts!)

Then, students chose 4 of their own important facts from our notes, turned them into complete sentences, and recorded them on our Martin Luther King, Jr. graphic organizer!

Martin Luther King Jr. Craft

On the 3rd day, we “published” our important facts anchor chart on the cutest little tie graphic organizer and made our Martin Luther King Jr craft!  Isn’t he adorable?? 🙂

Thanks to this Martin Luther King, Jr. mini unit, my first graders are ready to rock and roll with our next big goal in writing…choosing the most important facts to teach readers! 😉

You can find all of these Martin Luther King Jr. activities in this MLK Mini Unit. Or you can grab the entire 6 week American Contributors unit which includes MLK and many other Famous People!