If You Lived at the Time of Martin Luther King

Rating:
Summary: An easy-to-understand summary of the civil rights movement
Review: I read this book to my middle school students every year. Levine explains the need for a civil rights movement in terms that kids can understand. This book makes students want to learn more about this important event in American history.

Rating:
Summary: ''Come Learn About A Famous Man And You Will Be Number 1''
Review: If you lived at the time of Martin Luther King J r.
By Ellen Levine

The Book is about when it was the 1950's to 1960's. A man named Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader for the blacks. White people were very mean to African-Americans. They had to use different schools, phone booths, neighborhoods, bathrooms, restaurants, hotels, and drinking fountains.

I like this book because I wonder about if I were there, would I have tried to help the black people? I know I would have.

I also think the illustrator did a great job on coloring the pages. I think the author wrote this book because it was about segregated laws. She wanted kids to know a famous leader or what it was like if the kids were there with him.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to Civil Rights for Elementary ages!
Review: Whenever teachers in our predominantly white elementary school ask me to recommend a title pertaining to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or to African American history, this is one of the first books I suggest for grades 4, 5 and 6.The question and answer format lends itself to reading aloud and then discussing topics that come up, like segregation, white supremacy, the Montgomery bus boycott, etc. I recently read part of this book to a fourth grade class who just had "segregation" as a vocabulary word. The students were quite attentive and asked some excellent questions.The title is a bit misleading in that some might view it as a biography of Dr. King. While many sections do draw upon personal events in Dr. King's life, such as when he was a youngster riding in the car with his father and he heard a police officer call his dad "boy." Or again, when he was young and he was told he could no longer play with his white friends. But as the title says, it's really about if you lived at the "time" of Dr. King. Therefore, it's an excellent introduction to many aspects of the Civil Rights movement.While the watercolor illustrations are an improvement over the black and white drawings in earlier editions of this "If You Lived At the Time Of" series, in this case I think the text could be more fully enhanced with actual photographs, especially since many of these illustrations are copied from well-known photographs.All in all, this is an excellent introduction to the Civil Rights Movement for upper-elementary students (and apparently for middle-school students according to another review here). This is one title that, in my opinion, should be in every elementary school in the nation. Recommended.