Let Freedom Ring! Martin Luther King Jr. day in the United States is a time to celebrate his leadership traits, including unity, equality, service, courage, integrity and empathy. Our high school speech therapy students are in formative years, figuring out who they want to be, and what they stand for in their lives.
I’d like to share some speech therapy and educational activities for older students to honor Dr. King on MLK Jr. Day and to explore his leadership traits. These are activities that correspond with IEP goals that might be common in this age group.
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Compare and Contrast Leadership Traits and Styles
Use a Venn diagram, character web or other graphic organizer to compare and contrast character or leadership traits held by Dr. King and other leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. was the first black man to be named Time magazine’s man of the year. Compare him to other nominees for Time person of the year.
Make a Timeline of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life
You can use this information from the King institute to guide you.
Support a Claim with Contextual Evidence
Have students generate claims they think to be true about MLK Jr.’s character and leadership. Then, have student find at least 2 pieces of evidence that support their claim. Is the evidence from reputable websites?
Use Context from a Famous Speech: Analyze Word Meanings
Find a speech given by MLK Jr. online. Have students highlight or make note of new vocabulary words or phrases and determine the inferred meaning by the surrounding context. Then, verify the meaning in a dictionary.
I have a dream speech from Stanford University.
Boom Cards to Explore Martin Luther King’s Leadership Traits
If some of the online material is too difficult for your speech therapy students, you might like this set of BOOM cards. It covers the leadership traits and vocabulary comprehension of courage, unity, service, equality, integrity and empathy. I find that “empathy” is not widely covered in writings about Martin Luther King Jr. Empathy is an important trait for our students with perspective taking challenges to understand.
This deck explores:
- leadership traits,
- MLK Jr.’s accomplishments in bite-size pieces, narrated for struggling readers,
- definitions of the leadership traits,
- match the life accomplishments to the leadership traits,
- I have a dream activities,
- Meaning of MLK Jr. quotes,
- What would MLK Jr. Do? Current-day scenarios.
- Reflection.
Check out the video preview below!
You can grab it in my BOOM Learning Store, or
in my Teachers Pay Teacher’s Store.
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