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Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr is a timeless book well-known among K-6 teachers, students, librarians and book-lovers throughout the USA. This multi-award winning picture book provides readers with insight into Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s life and the oppression and progress of African Americans before and during an era known as the modern US Civil Rights Movement (CRM). The biography outlines the period’s equity issues, and serves as a springboard for this upper elementary lesson. While Dr King played an iconic role, there were many other individuals involved in the CRM, most of whom students do not know. The purpose of this paper is to offer varying perspectives related to lesser known CRM leaders, protesters, advocates, perpetrators and bystanders.

Technology is incorporated through online research, videos and productions; thus, students actively engage in making connections to various individuals’ points of view, those both supportive and oppositional. Students conduct research while responding to higher-order, critical-thinking questions regarding groups and forces of the CRM. Then, they expand knowledge through jigsaw research activities by collecting information, responding to inquiry questions and presenting relevant evidence-based information about CRM contributors, perpetrators and bystanders.

This is a National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Notable Tradebook Lesson Plan.

This is a NCSS Notable Tradebook Lesson Plan.

When we inhabit time and space, how can foresight be other than a parallax view? Not only is the ground shifting beneath our feet, but our culture colours our perspective. We replace our imagination with computers and program them with data that is often skewed. We begrudge paying our taxes yet offload risk to the public sector. For the environment in particular, the stakes have never been higher. Faith in the future means we all jump together.