Martin Luther King Essays and Anchor Writing

A couple of weeks ago, we began working on a special project. Mrs. Johnson wanted all our students to enter the Martin Luther King Essay Contest. You know what that means? We had a lot of work to do, and she LOVES to make us think hard and deep! Although we were not very excited at first, we quickly changed our minds when we heard what the winners received! I'll only give you a clue so that you can guess....it involved money!

We were asked to write about a person who lives out Dr. King's power of goodness and love. We were also presented with this quote as insight of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s values.

Since Anchor Writing is also due soon, Mrs. Johnson told us that she found a way to combine the two! Now, we can take more time to focus on this one writing assignment without being distracted! In combining the two prompts, we wrote about a person we would like to meet that shares the values of Martin Luther King, Jr.

To get us started, Mrs. Johnson read Martin's Big Words to us as a class. We discussed the book and what we thought Dr. King's values were after reading. It was very interesting to hear the various ideas taken from this book. After our discussion, we wrote on an index card the name of a person that we would like to meet that shares Dr. King's values, or "big words." Once we had chosen a person to write about, we began our research.

Mrs. Johnson provided us with a wonderful graphic organizer to get our thoughts organized. Mrs. Johnson said our neurons were flying all over the place and we needed a little help to organize all the ideas! That paints an interesting picture of what's going on in our brains! Ha!

We chose three values that our person and Dr. King share. Then, we came up with three examples showing how our person displayed each value. This required research. She brought encyclopedias, picture books, and magazines on each person we researched. Some groups even used the internet to research.

As we added ideas to our graphic organizers, we used a thesaurus to replace boring words. There were certain words Mrs. Johnson would not let us use. But, some of us used the thesaurus many times throughout our writing. It was great!

We put our ideas into paragraph form, including an introductory and closing paragraph. This gave us a total of five paragraphs! Mrs. Johnson edited them for us, and she held conferences with each person until we were ready to publish! The final products are very good.

Hopefully, we can share some here for you. You can definitely come by the school and take a look after Mrs. Johnson posts them in the hall.

Fourth graders will take a state writing test in March. Mrs. Johnson stressed the importance of each step of the writing process, and we discussed how easy it was when using all the steps. Hopefully, as we continue to practice our writing, we will be ready to fly in March on that test! WE will fly...our neurons will get organized! Ha!