Martin Luther King Foldable Project with a Timeline and Fact Cubes

Finally!

Today, my kids finally finished our Martin Luther King foldable we started almost two weeks ago!

Reading and Writing Before the Foldable

This is undoubtedly my fault. I can’t just do a simple foldable. Oh, no. That would be too easy. We have to…

• read an article
• gather information
• write a response
• revise it, edit it, publish it, use the map to practice map skills, sketch a portrait, identify character traits, create a timeline
• and use the timeline to answer questions.

Then we can put together our foldable.

Why Go Deeper Than a Quick Activity?

I do this all the time. I get a simple idea of something I think might be useful for the kids to do, and then I think, But wait! I can make this waaaaay better.

Then, six weeks later, we are putting the finishing touches on our

• endangered species
• black history month
• forces in the earth
• objects in space
• European explorers
• Native Americans
• fill in blank with other extremely large unit

unit that should have taken, like, four days.

But really, what do kids remember? Fly-bys? Learning everything there is to know in a couple of days? Or experiencing content in a variety of forms and reading and writing about it?

I hope it’s the second one or I’m really wasting my time.

Sources for Our MLK Unit

For our unit, we used several sources – an article I found online, a BrainPop Jr about MLK, and this Scholastic News article.

Inside Our MLK Jr. Foldables

Here are some of our foldables. Some of them came out sooo cute. My favorite is the Martin Luther King holding the tiny backwards American flag. Totally unexpected.

For the front, we used a timeline from Scholastic but I mixed up the events and had kids sequence them on the timeline.

Then, for the inside of that flap, we used the timeline to answer questions about events in Martin Luther King’s life.

On the inside of the one of the other flaps, we glued the map of the new Martin Luther King memorial that we received from Scholastic. The kids answered the questions using the map.

We also did a simple bubble map, or web, describing the traits that made MLK a good citizen.

The response in the middle is to the article in Scholastic about the new MLK memorial. We read (reread, discussed, charted) and then wrote a nonfiction response using the format from this previous post.

Martin Luther King Jr. Fact Cubes

We also made these fact cubes based on the articles we read. The kids recorded a fact about Martin Luther King on each side of the cube.

So whew! I’m glad I got this done before Groundhog Day! That’s just embarrassing.

More MLK Day ideas: Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities.

Get the Printable MLK Day Activities

If you’re interested in the fact cube we made, you can find it in my Celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at TPT! It’s got the fact cubes, an article, a fun mobile activity, an adorable banner, and some writing prompts to help kids think about Dr. King and his (and their) impact on the world!