My son’s preschool class has been talking about the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. “Martin Luther King was a peacemaker,” my son informed me last week. “And a bad man shotted him.”
All things considered, I’m glad he doesn’t say the word “shot” enough to know its proper grammatical usage. I agreed with his assessment of Dr. King, and reaffirmed that being a peacemaker meant trying to teach people to get along.
The next, day, when I picked him up from school, he told me, “All people have melons in their skin.”
I had an image of bulbous protuberances, and wondered how this came up in the classroom.
“If you live in a hot place, you have a lot of melons in your skin,” he explained, “but if you live in a cold place, you don’t have a lot of melons.”
Ah. “You mean ‘melanin.'”
“Melanin.”
I think it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be having to explain that “les beans” are not, in fact, a type of French legume. Still, if he understands the value of peacemakers, I’m okay with that.
How have you explained this holiday to your children? What do you say when they ask why someone shot Dr. King?
(For those who in fact want to teach their young children a bit more about Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ll point out the list of age-appropriate books about him that I posted last year.)
I’ve spent the day chanting the rhyme we learned in preschool:
Martin Luther King was a mighty, mighty man, and a mighty, mighty man was he. He was a preacher and a teacher and a man of God and he loved both you and me.
Since I went to preschool and elementary school in Atlanta, we always made a very big deal about MLK Day. One year we took a field trip to his house. All the messages must have worked, I think; I was color-blind until high school racism set in.