Crew Hamill already had some knowledge of Rosa Parks prior to this lesson as we had looked at her briefly during hook week and also came across her name during our lessons on Martin Luther King Jr. We knew already that he had helped her when she had been arrested but this lesson allowed us to find out in more detail exactly why she had been arrested and why this was so important. We worked together to become experts on Rosa Parks, looking at four different sources of evidence: a newspaper article, a story, some direct quotes and the police report from her arrest. We worked in pairs to analyse these sources of evidence and pull out as much information as we could, adding it to our BBK. We then came together as a full crew and shared this information to create chotting sheets for our class display.

We began this lesson by watching a video of Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, “I Have a Dream”, discussing how it made us feel and any notices we made about it. We then spent some time looking at some of the key vocabulary from the speech that we might have needed some support understanding: manacle, stripped, selfhood, quicksand, injustice, sweltering, oppression. Once we had more of an understanding of these words, we looked at a selection of quotes from MLK’s speech that included this vocabulary and we worked as a crew to pull them apart. This allowed us to really understand some of the key messages Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to get across in his speech.

Crew Hamill have absolutely loved learning about Martin Luther King Jr. over the last few weeks. Having looked at him briefly in hook week, we have learned a little more about him during our reading lessons by focusing on a story of his life. Because of this, we already had some knowledge of who he is and why he is so important to our expedition and this set us in good stead for our expedition lessons in which we have built our background knowledge ever further. We have worked in mini crews to highlight chunks of information, pulling out the facts about Martin Luther King Jr. We have also watched a video clip on the story of his life which allowed us to make more notes on our chotting paper. After this, we then brought all of our information together as a crew to create a class chotting sheet for our display, drawing our attention to the key dates which we can then add to our class timeline.