I’m consolidating posts from years past all here:

(This I wrote while pregnant with Joseph) – I feel really bad that we didn’t do anything to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day until this evening and we lost this wonderful opportunity to teach the kids more. Next year I’ll prepare ahead of time (and not have morning sickness) and make it a bigger deal. We read to Christopher from “My First Book of Biographies” about MLK and Rosa Parks and then watched two speeches on-line. It was really neat to see his eyes and watch how fascinated he was and then to answer some questions about segregation. He asked if we can bake a cake to celebrate MLK’s birthday. 🙂

So, I’ve not started researching yet for next year but how did you commemorate? Any good websites or books to help kids learn more about the Civil Rights Movement? Christopher asked how people celebrate and I was sad to say I cannot remember ANY celebration growing up! Isn’t that terrible? Like President’s Day or Labor Day or Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day – it’s a day off of school but shouldn’t it be so much more??? Especially these days to remember these heros… I resolve to be better this year about using these opportunities to teach our kids why these days are important and what we are remembering.

From 2009:

The official site from the government and some fun preschool ideas.

We are reading a biography of him from Christopher’s kids’ biography book. We also watched clips from two of his speeches and will be making a handprint wreath in different colored papers and writing on them ideas we can do this next year to serve others. We’ll be doing a diversity dinner (spread out over the whole week – lots of diversity dinners) using some recipes from our kids’ international cookbook.

I think as the kids are older we’ll exploring the diversity in cooking more, we found a great book about it.

I want to find some fun activities for tomorrow to help the kids understand the ceremony and hopefully today will help them appreciate in some small way the significance of tomorrow. 🙂 I’m still looking for some good inauguration sites for the kids, any ideas?

Update: Snagging this from the library. The entire speech with illustrations!

Update for 2011: quotes here to discuss with kids & have older ones practice their cursive writing one out then illustrating/decorating it to hang up on their new magnetic dry erase board.

Start at 10:00 for little clip for kids to watch in co-op.

Update: here’s a photo of the hands wreath we made with their “I have a dream” statement or picture on it.

We’ve met almost weekly with these friends through various forms of co-op for four years next month! We first started meeting in February 2007 when Emy was itty bitty and here we are many children later. 🙂 (And that photo isn’t even all the kids between our two families.)

Free downloads from iTunes of Great African American Oratory.