Today Fayetteville Public Schools are not in session due to the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Since this is such an important holiday, I thought I would take a retrospective look at MLK Day by reposting an entry from last year’s class blog from Noel, Missouri. This entry was orginially posted Janurary 19th, 2009…enjoy.
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…..with a little help from our friend Dr. Seuss.

With today being MLK Day, the sixth grade teachers decided that we would use Jim Crow Laws to help us with the explanation of the civil rights movement, and how important MLK actually was. We used Dr. Seuss’ book The Sneetches to help us do this. In the story The Sneetches, there are two types of Sneetches, those with stars on their bellies and those with none on thars.

So we separated our students into star bellies and non-stars. These students were labeled with little red stars that they wore on their face or hand. The non-star group was not allowed to use the same textbooks, water fountains, bathrooms, or desk as the star students. They were even split up at lunch; star students were allowed to sit anywhere, and non-stars were made to sit at one cramped table. Also, students without stars were not given the same amount of help on classwork that the students without stars were given. This activity was very frustrating to many of the students, and it helped them catch a glimpse of what education was like during theJim Crow era.

My homeroom class was also asked to compare and contrast the videos we watched about civil rights and education to The Sneetches on Ning. Click on the link below to view their responses.
Sneetches

To view the full version of this post (with video) click here.

Mr. McClung