Martin Luther King Day

One of the perks of homeschooling is that you get to decide when you have school and when you don't. For example, my local public school is out today because of Martin Luther King Day. We are having school today. Why, you may ask? I thought this would be a good opportunity to teach my kids about why we celebrate Martin Luther King.

We started our day with pledge/prayer/scripture reading just like usual. Then we went on to memorize the following passage:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Afterwards, we watched the famous "I have a dream" speech excerpt on YouTube. The kids LOVED hearing the excerpt that we had just memorized!! We talked about what life would have been like for little African American kids growing up with racial segregation around the time of MLK. We then watched a documentary called, "Roads to Memphis" which spoke of the assassination of Martin Luther King. It has a lot of MLK's speeches shown in the documentary.

Since we live in Atlanta, we could have visited MLK's childhood home and toured it for free today, but I figured it was going to be jammed-packed. Maybe another time...

(Ideas for older homeschoolers: watching "The Help" would have been fun and informative. Reading it would have been an even better option.) If only Addi was a bit older... For now we will stick with our documentaries.