Monday is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a federal holiday observed by all states. This means your little one has the day off school. While this is a major holiday, Lee's class didn't do anything special to celebrate and I'm not sure if he learned anything about who Dr. King is (at least that's what he told me. I'll have to double check with his teacher).
Nonetheless, I have found a site that has some great ideas of things you can do at home to help your preschooler learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. and what he stood for. My favourite is the I Have A Dream cloud:
Materials:
1. A coloring sheet of Martin Luther King
2. one sheet of Construction Paper (any color)
3. Cotton balls
4. Yarn (any color)
5. Scissors
6. Crayons
7. Hold puncher
8. Glue & pencils
9. white construction paper
Description: Ask children to color a picture of Martin Luther King. Then have children draw a big picture of a cloud on the construction paper. Next, cut the cloud out and glue cotton balls all over it. Then cut out the picture of Martin Luther King. After that use the hold puncher to punch two holes at the bottom of the cloud and two holes at the top of the Martin Luther King picture.
Next, cut a small piece of yarn to tie the cloud to the picture of Martin Luther King then, using a small piece of white construction paper cut into a rectangle, write I HAVE A DREAM on it and glue it inside of the cloud. Encourage children to talk about what Dr. Martin Luther King's dream means to them.
You can also ask them what their dreams are and write them on the cloud.
If you're in NYC, be sure to check out Mommy Poppins for activities to do on Martin Luther King day with the kids.
What are you doing to celebrate? Please leave a comment below.
We're going to have some united pudding and do something small to change the world. I think Dr. King would approve.
My children went to The Bank Street School for Children when they were very young (and one of my kids went there until she was 10). Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday was essentially THE holiday. (At my other kid’s elementary school, Hamilton Heights School, in the school’s early years, Dr. King’s birthday was also the big deal.) We sang so many songs about Dr. King at the sing-a-longs — and prepped for it weeks in advance. The parents were always in tears on The Holiday. It was just a moving moment. And our children were little, as yours are now, all you Preschool POV readers — parents are made so vulnerable by having children, aren’t we?
ANYWAY, one of the sad things that surrounded that holiday was that the little kids often came to feel that brown-skinned boys who stand up for themselves and others WILL die violently. If you asked a little kid about Dr. King, he was likely to say, “He was shot!” As if that was the whole story. Parents fretted a lot about that. And at Hamilton Heights School, we left that part of the story out. We just went with the morals and the vision and left out a lot of the biography.
I wonder if that trick piece with little boys, the Dr. King story and the violence aspect of it is still going on. I hope not. But . . . it was a pitfall of boys and the story, and we came to realize that we had to handle it very carefully.