Kelly Springs students present Black History Month program

Kelly Springs Elementary School students took an unorthodox approach to presenting a black history program Friday.

Instead of the standard speech and lecture, students presented a “To Tell the Truth” style panel where three students pretended to be King. Each of the students answered questions about the civil rights leader, but only one student gave truthful answers. At the end of the program, students watching the panel voted on who was representing the real King.

While some of the answers given by students on the panel sounded accurate, other responses were dead giveaways, such as when Timothy Dowd said King had won an award from MTV for producing a rap video.

“I was laughing at him when he said MTV,” Mykaliah Bryant, 10, another student on the panel, said.

Sharon Kelly, Kelly Springs Elementary School principal, said the unusual approach to the program provided a more engaging learning experience than traditional presentations.

“Many times we listen to speeches and hear people talk about black history,” she said. “This was a different way of presenting the information.”

Lisa Weston, Kelly Springs LinC teacher, said she organized the presentation in the panel format because she thought it would catch students’ attention.

“I thought it would be entertaining for kindergarten through fifth grade,” she said.

Dowd said he enjoyed participating on the panel and learned a lot from the project.

“We learned how he did a lot of great things for the country to make black people the same as white people,” he said.

Black History Month was started in 1926 by historian Carter G. Woodson who designated it as “Negro History Week.”Woodson chose the second week of February because it marked the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two Americans who greatly influenced the struggle for equality between the races.