Our church is hosting a special Martin Luther King, Jr. program this weekend. The church’s youth were invited to participate by completing an essay or designing a poster about one of Dr. King’s traits. My girls chose the words visionary and leader and decided they wanted to create posters to share what they knew and learned about Martin Luther King, Jr.

The girls wanted their posters to be colorful, artistic, and non-traditional as well as informative. I encouraged them to include the dove of peace on their posters and the girls decided to decorate them using a couple of art mediums they had recently learned about.

Sweet Pea’s poster showcases Martin Luther King Jr. as a visionary and includes a colorful dove of peace painted using an artistic technique called pointillism. (For a lesson on pointillism, check out the Youtube video here.) Sweet Pea’s dove is holding a branch and each leaf includes a sentence describing Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision. Her poster also includes her definition of the word visionary, two Bible verses about vision and peace, and a couple of Martin Luther King, Jr. photos she liked.

Sugar Plum’s poster also includes the dove of peace, but her colorful bird was created using oil pastels. (For a lesson on the use of oil pastels, check out this video on Youtube.) Her poster has the definition of leader as defined in her own words and includes puzzle pieces that name traits of a good leader. Each puzzle piece also includes a sentence describing how Martin Luther King, Jr. displayed that particular trait. Sugar Plum also selected a few pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr to add to the poster.

If you’d like to make these pretty posters, you’ll need poster paper, construction paper, glue, scissors, and the usual variety of art supplies. We used a dove template I already had in my files, but if you don’t have one, you can download the dove template found in the center of this page. I enlarged our dove so it would be big enough to fit on the posters. We sketched the leaves and branches ourselves.

Sugar Plum’s puzzles pieces were created using this template. Because the puzzle piece was so large, no resizing was necessary. However, if you want to include more puzzle pieces on your poster, you may wish to reduce the size of the template.

These Martin Luther King poster projects are a great way for your child show what she knows about Martin Luther King, Jr. Though you may wish use the format modeled here, your child can still put her own spin on this project by adding personally selected photos of  Dr. King, writing statements about his life and vision, and choosing to use artistic techniques to express her feelings about Dr. King and his legacy.