Martin Luther King, JR.

Wow, MArtin Luther King, JR. Day is just around the corner! Being out of the school system, I tend to loose track of these important dates until they are on top of me. Thanks to a local Teacher-Librarian asking about some good resources, I have been spurred to share the following:

The first resource I want to tell you about is The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. You can't really get more authoritative than this. There are some audio and video resources, teacher developed lesson plans, student resources (including an online King Encyclopedia), and transcriptions of a selection of King's sermons and speeches. I was a bit disappointed that some of the sermon and speech links led to a 'buy this book' entry. But, despite that, this site has a lot to offer.

A nice companion to the above resource is the Civil Rights Digital Library and the Civil Rights resources for Teachers at the Library of Congress. The Civil Rights Digital Library can be browsed by event, people, topics or places and Educator Resources they have culled from other websites. These resources include bibliographies, worksheets, lesson plans, and study guides. The Civil Rights resources for Teachers at the Library of Congress has all that you have come to expect from the LOC - primary resources, lesson plans, exhibitions and presentations. Lots of material to dive into with your students!

There is also a documentary made in 2004 called Mighty Times : The Children's March (recommended for grades 6-8) which you can apparently get for free from the Teaching Tolerance Project . It's probably too late to get a copy of this for this year but you can get a jump start on next year.

And for those of you near the Seattle area, there's the 2nd Annual Student March for Peace and Justice organized by Giddens School and the Northwest African American Museum. Join them if you can.