Martin Luther King Jr.

In honor of Martin Luther King day on Monday, we learned this week more about the significance of Dr. King. At the beginning of the week we created a brochure and filled in what we already knew about Martin Luther King Jr., as well as what questions we had about him. We then read a few read aloud books about MLK and built more knowledge of the history of his life and his purpose behind fighting for civil rights. After reading about him, the kids came up with characteristics to describe the type of person he was. The students shared individually what traits they chose and evidence from the read aloud to support their reason. On Wednesday, we focused more on Dr. King's "I have a Dream Speech." The kids had the opportunity to listen to part of his speech and also read about the marches Dr. King led to end segregation and change the laws. As a class we then brainstormed dreams we had for our world. Each student wrote their own "I have a dream" sentence and shared it. We complied all our pages together to make a classroom book for our library. We ended the week by filling in what we learned after studying Martin Luther King Jr., and then we wrote an informative piece about the facts we had gathered about this historical man. Through this writing activity the kids focused on including a topic sentence with at least three facts and a closing sentence. The theme this week was really interesting for the kids and I believe they enjoyed learning more about the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

In math, we focused on addition strategies to 20. The students learned about doubles, doubles plus 1, making 10, making tens and ones, and counting on this week. We spent the majority of the week doing lots of modeling and practicing with these strategies in both whole and small group. The goal is that students are accuarate when solving addition problems, and the second goal is that they can improve on their speed as well. This week we really focused on accuracy. The speed will come, but this skill is so important for when we begin addition to 40 later on down the road.