My teaching partner and I were lucky enough to SCORE a full day of planning (because we are newbies to this grade level!) with our instructional coach this week. We got SO much done, my little OCD heart is singing. With MLK day coming up really quickly, I knew that we needed to plan some inspiration within our upcoming lessons. MLK Jr. is such an amazing leader and a great way to teach my students about an powerful speaker and dreamer.

Need some MLK activities? Pin it to save!

In the mist of our planning, we scoped out a bunch of MLK Jr. projects for this upcoming week. My favorite by far is what I’m calling the MLK Suit & Tie! I’m not exactly who it originated from (the joys of Pinterest) but we both loved the idea of creating a writing activity to base our lessons around. We knew we wanted to make something just like the samples above so I created a sheet that had both his dream and our students on them. You can grab it FREE by clicking the link below. I searched and even found this FREE step by step drawing of Martin’s face from Mrs. Miner’s blog! My kids totally love the directed drawings as we have been doing all year. Then to go along with learning about his dream speech, we found another freebie from Simply School Teacher which is a non-fiction book on his life with tons of text features (the perfect re-introduction for my kiddos)!

To put the whole thing together you are going to take an 11 by 14 black construction paper, fold it so it meets in the middle then fold the edges out to make his suit jacket. Then glue the sheet in the center. We then did the direct drawing from above and glued that on the top of our project. My students then did a gallery walk with their personal dreams and read each others.