Martin Luther King Day in 2023

When Barbara Walters died at the end of December, I saw a tweet noting that she and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were born the same year (1929) and that is how much (potential) life was stolen from him. It was a stark reminder for me. This year marks 55 years since Dr. King was assassinated. 

How to best address Martin Luther King Day in the classroom is a constant question for us. We’ve written about it before and always wonder what the best approach is. Doing or saying nothing doesn’t feel right, but neither does a quick one day activity. You can read about our approach last year here: MLK Day 2022: Reminders & Ideas and our approach with 5th graders here: Observing MLK Day in the Classroom. Teaching the History of Voting Rights in the USA is also always a timely reminder and important lesson.

There are so many book lists out there already, so we will just share a few books for read aloud ideas below. I keep coming back to thinking about his larger legacy and the legacy of his family members (especially Coretta Scott King) as well. Even if you don’t end up reading the books to your entire class, you can have them available for students who would like to learn more.  (Thanks to Diverse Book Finder for inspiration in my search for read alouds).

Coretta Scott by Ntozake Shange and Kadir Nelson (pictured above).

I have a dream by Martin Luther King and Kadir Nelson

Love will see you through by Angela Farris Watkins and Sally Wern Comport (written by Dr. King’s niece),

Someday is now by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich and Jade Johnson (I definitely need to learn more about Clara Luper!).

One last note - many schools and communities have a day of service in honor of Dr. King. Make sure your students know why this is taking place and answer their questions (they will have questions!).

Our SOME portrait project: how and why we do service learning

Service Learning

In 5th grade we do a service learning experience that aims to honor what is developmentally appropriate for 5th graders and prioritize maintaining the utmost dignity of the others.

Service Learning is such a complicated realm, as we work to ensure that we don't "otherize" or create complicated (and potentially problematic) narratives about what 'help' is and who helps whom.

Our SOME (So Others Might Eat) project is one of our favorite service learning experiences, because we think it does work towards our ideals of what service learning should look like: meaningful to all, authentic, and a learning experience!

The Process!

Our project starts when 5th grade goes to study portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery- learning about how portraits are about more than just a face, but the stories behind those faces. Those stories are the key aspects that get incorporated into the art you see!

We then prepare questions, how to ask politely about other people's lives, how to work through nerves and awkwardness, speak loudly and enunciate etc.. and we also learn about SOME and they work they have done and are doing in DC.

Then 5th grade goes to SOME's Kuehner House (which provides affordable housing, activities, and other support to seniors in the community). During our visit, each student gets partnered up with a participant and interviews them. We spend about an hour together, sharing stories, taking notes, and taking pictures of one another.

5th then goes back to Sheridan and begins to work on creating portraits that capture aspects of their new friends’ personality and stories. These portraits take us a long time because we work really hard to make them as special as we can!

Excitedly (and with a different type of nerves this time!) we head back to SOME to revisit the senior participants and deliver our artwork to them. This project brings joy, dignity, and stories to both parties, and thus it is a service learning experience we continue every year. Take a look at some of the portraits our students have done -- we are biased, but we think they should be in the National Portrait Gallery, too!

This year, we were thanked with a performance by two of the seniors: beautiful singing accompanied by keyboard playing.

We'd love to hear what service learning experiences work for you all in your schools and programs. What does it look like? How do you think about it?

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Service Learning Possibilities for the Year!

Service learning has been really tricky for us in the past as it can feel contrived or otherizing or at the very least, feel less than meaningful for our students.

Below are two ideas we have to incorporate thoughtful, beneficial service learning into our new school year.

We are very excited about some programs that are in the Dominican Republic, specifically, Alta Gracia, which would go really well with our Economics unit. Alta Gracia pays their workers a living wage and says that, "In addition to this salary, we respect our employees’ rights as workers and as human beings, including the right to a safe and healthy workplace, the right to be treated with dignity and respect on the job, and the right to form a union." We met with Alta Gracia employees and multiple union leaders and workers this summer, and feel like this could be a great conversation and mutually beneficial experience for our students and the company.

The other piece we have been thinking about is the Dakota Access Pipeline. Any of you who follow our work know that we care deeply and work to educate ourselves and our students as much as possible about Indigenous peoples' histories, struggles, and excellence, and to do our best to be in solidarity. We are thinking about how we might get our students involved in this conversation in an effective way.  We have already told them when we planned on attending protests and offered them the option of helping us make/decorate our signs!

Please, please fill us in if you have thoughts and skills on incorporating service learning into your classroom. This is definitely an area we want to grow!

More soon.

Nina and Gabby

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Preparing for the school year: Post #2: Things we are changing!

And we're back to continue our reflection on preparing for the upcoming school year.

In this post we want to share with you some of the things we want to change for the upcoming school year.

Change is constant, and we are excited to take it on, even as it brings some discomfort (and often a little extra work) into our lives. As Emily Style says, "Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students on the first day.." Which to us means that this list will most definitely get a whole lot longer and intricate as the year progresses!

We are going to try…

Mini-home groups:

• We already made a push to have affinity groups at our school. We now run an affinity group for 3-5th graders that we feel has brought so much life and love to our students of color. We love it so much that we have been wondering how to bring even more of that into our classroom, so that it isn't just that once a week moment where our SOC attendees feel exceptionally seen and heard.

• As a result, we are going to test out having little 'advisories' within our classroom. We are going to have to be creative about this schedule-wise (never enough time!) but we are willing to take on the headache to test this out.

• We have some new students this year, as well. We love the idea of a group of six kids getting to really know each other, have each other's backs, decompress together (especially after tough talks about the news), and take turns sharing together in a conversational community.

• We also love the seeds this space sows for storytelling and honoring one another's stories. We can get them well on their way feeling comfortable sharing from their own point of view as storytellers, before we have even begun our storytelling unit!

• We are going to try to facilitate with them as teachers at least once every two weeks to ensure a safe space and check in on how it is going. Depending on how things go, we will release our facilitation process (ideally!) as the year goes on.

Differentiating homework more effectively:

• This is something we are going to keep thinking about. See our post from our Differentiated Instruction conference here. We are going to be thinking (as always, but even more so) about differentiation and student support all year. Stay tuned.

Service Learning Work:

• We love the work our students do with SOME (So Others Might Eat) in which they create portraits of seniors who visit the SOME program.

• In general, however, we have struggled with how to do service learning work in a way that doesn't set up an 'us' / 'them' dichotomy and that is realistic about what is actually 'helpful'. We recognize that 26 ten year olds running around a quiet space so they can feel like they 'gave back' is not helpful. We also want to constantly question this notion that students already have about who needs help and who does the helping. This is a lot for 5th graders, and thus, we haven't quite figured it out yet ;).

• However, this year, we do want to teach/inquire specifically into the dynamics of help, and discuss working with people and organizations and talk through how we might do that.

• Two possibilities that are on our minds are working with Alta Gracia around labor rights and activism about the Dakota Access Pipeline

There are other things we will change, of course, but these are the big ideas we are mulling over.

In the meantime, let us know what kind of changes you have made (or think we should make!) that have improved your communities and your classrooms. We are always looking to make 5th grade better!

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