Martin Luther King, Jr. Sketch and Write

Today in class we learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. We watched a video on Discovery Education of the book Martin’s Big Words by Doreen Rappaport. The book is read aloud by Michael Clarke Duncan and is just beautiful- the illustrations, background music, and his deep voice come together to make a vivid impact on anyone who watches. After watching the video, we had a great discussion. If you don’t have access to Discovery Education, then you could just read the book aloud- it is a great read aloud!

After reading, we incorporated some art with the facts that we learned. I gave each student a blank white piece of copy paper to begin. I drew one step at a time on an anchor chart, and the students drew on their papers. 

Here are the steps that I break the drawing into- but if you chose to do this project you could break it into as many steps as you wanted to. For most kids, if I asked them to draw Martin Luther King, Jr., they would tell me they couldn’t do it, or that it didn’t look right, but by breaking it into pieces they all can create! Also, I chose to draw him with a large head and small body and the kids really got a kick out of that!

First steps…

Next…

Then…

It’s looking like a person now…

And finally the body…

After we finish drawing, then comes the really fun part! We talk about each part of Martin and relate a fact about his life to that part. Then we write it on the chart. Here are the facts we wrote…