Five for Friday-I Have a Dream!

It's a brutally cold Friday morning, but any Friday is a good one, right? And it's especially good when I link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

My sweet doodle, Emmitt, got a haircut. Look at that face!

We finished up our Southern Colonies unit in Social Studies this week, so as we always do, we played a review game before the test. The game for this unit is one of my favorites, Hoop Shoot Review! It's a game you can easily adapt to any subject area. Here's how I do it:

* Put students in groups of 4, and have them number off 1-4. Students will rotate being the recorder/shooter.

* Set up a basket with a 1 point shot, a 2 point shot, and a 3 point shot. (I just put masking tape on the floor.)
* Give each group a marker board, marker, and eraser.
* Ask the class a question. The groups may quietly discuss the answer (quiet enough that other groups don’t hear) then student #1 writes the answer on the marker board. (I let my kids use their study guides, because I want them to read it a hundred times if possible!)
* Ask the groups to show you their answers. Each group that has the correct answer gets to take a shot at the basket from the distance of their choice. Obviously, the 3 point shot is the farthest. The person whose turn it was to write the answer is the shooter.
* Next question, person #2 will be the recorder/shooter, and so on.

This brave young man is going for the 3 pointer!

My students didn't have school on Monday for Martin Luther King Day so we did some activities on Tuesday during reading and writing workshop to celebrate. I created these activities and used them for the first time this year, and I was really pleased with how they went.

I started with this book, My Brother Martin, written by his sister, Christine King Farris. I like how it tells about the childhood of MLK, showing how he came to be the leader of the Civil Rights Movement.

I created a Think, Pair, Share worksheet to use along with the book. My students had some great conversations!

At the book store last weekend, I found this beautiful book which contains an excerpt from "I Have a Dream".

It also comes with a recording of the speech. I decided that holding up the book while the recording played was not going to do it justice. So, I took pictures of each page and made a PowerPoint presentation with it. I turned out the lights, started the recording at about the 11 minute mark, and then began the slide show. It was amazing!

After listening to the excerpt from the speech I told my kids that we were really going to dive in and do some work analyzing parts of the speech and find some examples of literary devices and figurative language that helped to make the speech so powerful. We started with an activity called A Closer Look at MLK's Dream that we did as a jigsaw.

I had seven groups of kids looking at different excerpts from the speech. They used dictionaries, the internet, and their thinking to find the deeper meaning behind the words.

Each group then shared what they had found with the rest of the class. Next we did a scavenger hunt through a longer excerpt of the speech to find literary devices and figurative language like allusion, anaphora (Anyone else never hear of this word before? It just means repetition. I learned something new too!), simile, and metaphor.

After we finished that discussion, I showed them a video clip of the speech from youtube. They had already listened to part of it, but I wanted them to see it and hear it again after all the work they did diving into it. This is the clip that I used.

My students were paying such close attention and some of them applauded when it was done. I asked them if they got more out of it this time after looking more closely at his words, and they all agreed that they had. (Not that they would ever just tell me what I want to hear!)

Finally, I ended with a writing activity about what their dream was for a better world. I told them to think of a problem in the world and then imagine what the world would be like if that problem was solved. They silently worked for 45 minutes and the results were beautiful!