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.

Exploratorium : the museum of science, art and human perception

The Exploratorium is a museum website brought to you by San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts containing (according to them) 18,000 pages. That's pretty overwhelming and I will never actually view all of them. It is a kind of busy website but, that said, it has lots of cool stuff useful to you and your students.

Under Educate is their page of Tools for Teaching. Currently this page is spotlighting Cow's Eye Dissection which includes a video of a dissection (no, I didn't watch it as I have just had my dinner), eye diagrams, and activity instructions (yes, including how to dissect a cow's eye). Other Tools for Teaching include how-to videos of after school/at home activities, hands on activities, a Digital Library containing resources pertaining to their exhibits, Webcasts and Podcasts, and Educator Newsletter and Online Exhibitions. They even have videos of Iron Science Teacher, which is like Iron Chef but with, yes you guessed it, Science Teachers having to design a science or math activity using the "secret ingredient". Pretty entertaining, I must say.

I enjoyed this site and think it has lots to offer. I'm going to definitely explore it more another day and maybe even watch that eye dissection video...