Black History Month: Compare and Contrast MLK and Nelson Mandela

In honor of Black History Month and reading My Brother Martin and Me by Christine King Farris (Martin's sister) in our fourth grade Journeys book, we decided to compare and contrast Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. 

My class is a 1:1 Chromebook class, so we did this assignment together as a class on Google Docs. 

If you purchase this item on TPT, you can easily copy and paste from the PDF into Google Docs.

If you haven't used Google Docs as a class, I suggest going over a procedure for erasure. If someone accidentally deletes the graphic organizer, we all stop immediately and take hands off the keyboards until the mistake can be fixed by the person who deleted or until the previous version can be restored.

The great thing about this lesson is that I have adapted it for you so that it can be used in whole or in parts, independently or in small or whole groups. This would even be great if you homeschool! Rubrics are included for different expectations. You also don't have to search for resources to make sure they are appropriate since I've included links for you!

See more pages and download this resource in my TPT store.

We also watched his I Have a Dream speech 

and made this beautiful dove bulletin board. 

Students wrote ways they will and already do use peaceful, powerful words.

Who else would you like to see included in another compare and contrast project?

Black History Month: The Harlem Renaissance

My students and I just read Me and Uncle Romie by Claire Hartfield in our Journeys book. It's a fictional story written from the first-person point-of-view of James, who was a nephew of real-life deceased artist Romare Bearden.

 They almost immediately recognized the illustrations as being familiar because we recently finished reading a poetry book called My Man Blue from our Making Meaning / Collaborative Literacy Pilot. Both books were illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue.

These books were perfect for lightly touching upon segregation and discrimination while teaching kids about friendship, family, and life in New York City / Harlem. 

Click here or on the image above to download my character trait inferencing form.

I also paired Me and Uncle Romie with Students made text-to-text connections with My Hands Sing the Blues: Romare Bearden's Childhood Journey, which is written as a form of poetry like My Man Blue.

Check out some of Romare's artwork on the Romare Bearden Foundation website. Make sure to preview images of his art before showing students! One neat project we didn't get to do just yet was collage art. Hopefully we will have some time soon!

Oliver K. Woodman Letter Writing Project

In third grade, we read The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman by Darcy Pattison.

A fun extension we did was to write letters to friends and family across the U.S., North America, and all around the world. We asked them to send us a letter or email back tell us what they did with Oliver.

 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Oliver-K-Woodman-Letter-Writing-Project-4401747

We posted mini Olivers on a map with their location so that we could learn more about geography and landmarks.

It was a blast! If you want to join in, here is a link to our letter as well as a map and printable Oliver you can mail out to others.

Here are some other cool resources we used to track Oliver's journey in the book, plus a neat video of the book in case you don't have it.

Check out my other Oliver K. Woodman post!

Winter Cinquain Poems

Every year, I feel the time crunch between Thanksgiving break and December winter break. This fun poem writing activity helps us practice poem writing and parts of speech. Plus, it's fun to color and stick up on a bulletin board!

Students get to pick a Google Slide and then they type their poem in the text box. It's easy to print all of them because they are all in one presentation. No one has deleted anyone else's slide, but it's a pretty easy fix if they do because I keep a master copy and then share an editable one with them in Google Classroom / Drive.

Before doing this writing assignment, we practice the Eight Parts of Speech song, which comes from Scholastic's Memory-Boosting Mnemonic Songs. 

Here are a couple of slides from the Google Slides presentation I created to go along with the song.

Find the editable poem presentation in my TPT store here. 

This 30 slide PowerPoint presentation includes 28 editable fill-in-the-blank poem pages with directions an examples. You will also get a link to the editable Google Slides presentation. These poems look great as a bulletin board. Just print, color, cut, and glue onto construction paper!

Been There, Read and Scene That!

Thanks for visiting today to share in our special news! Our DonorsChoose.org project titled "Been There, Read and Scene That!" was fully funded! At first, the books and bags were paired in Ziplock bags and put on the bulletin board.

After this project, we had too many to fit in that space, so I bought these cool bags and organizer from Really Good Stuff.

Materials from the new project have arrived and have been scanned into Booksource so students can check them out and see their reading levels. Students couldn't wait to use their Reading-Rewards RR miles to borrow books and movies to take home!

  

 Learn more about Reading-Rewards and Booksource here.

Some students are waiting to borrow a book and a movie until Thanksgiving break, when they will have more free time. Here are just a few of the combos we got.

If you'd like a list of books and movies that we received, go to the Donors Choose project list here and click "Where Your Donation Goes". Also check out some movie/book combos I purchased earlier on this older post.

If you're inspired to donate to a current project on DonorsChoose, here's the link for our class!