Martin Luther King Jr. Day Activities

One of the hard parts about blogging themed days or holidays is figuring out timing for your posts. For example we plan to do some fun activities for Martin Luther King Jr Day but if I post them that day its probably a little too late for you to use.  Most of the time its not a big deal but in this case doing them early kind of takes the excitement away from my kids.  So here's my plan...I'm going to share my ideas/plan for the day and I'll update the post after we are done with the activities.  Hopefully this will give you some great ideas and motivate me to actually stick to our plan and not lounge around watching tv all day (lets be honest at 8 months pregnant that is not sounding so bad haha).

I love teaching my kids at home and I love using days like this to teach my kids about kindness, a little about diversity, and a little about history.

So here's the plan...

Activity #1    The past couple of years we have watched Kid President's video about MLK. We will be watching it again and use it as a starting point for our discussion.  He does a great job.

Activity #2  This year I really want to focus on the idea that our small actions can make a difference in the world.  We are going to make a cute little banner.  I created these printables to make it easy.  It comes in 6 colors, 1 black and white so they can color their own boarder, and one without a boarder that you can glue scrapbook or colored paper behind.  Print your desired colors on cardstock, cut around the edge, in the center have your kids draw or write what they can do to make a difference, (add scrapbook paper and  glue if you choose to go that route),  hole punch the top corners and string ribbon or yarn to create your banner.  You can have each kids make their own with 3 or 4 pennants or combine your kids into one banner.

Download your copy here...I also create 2 cute coloring page that are included in the file.

Activity #3  Make playdough!  I ran across this idea on pinterest and it is exactly what I was looking for.  We'll be following her plan.

Activity #4  Paper Chain dolls.  I love the idea of Unity & Friendship these little dolls represent.  I had a really hard time finding some basic instructions or a template.  But I found some good ones for you and me.

This first one is actually for a gingerbread man but it is a great template for a person too :)  You can find it here.

This one has some fun templates and great instructions (found here).

These ballerinas are too cute not to share.  You can find them here.

These are so adorable!  They are actually individual dolls that she linked together after she dressed them. Find her tutorial here

I love the yarn hair and dresses on these ones.  Great tutorial found here.

If you have a princess lover (there is also a robot one) you can print these here.

And if you are feeling super ambitious these fabric ones are amazing!  

Adorable idea found here

And the tutorial (and equally as adorable dolls) found here

 I hope this gives you a few ideas.  I think it will be a really fun day full of learning and creating.

You can find our other MLK activities from previous years here