Brown Eggs and Peace

     If you are a teacher in Texas then you have heard of CScope.  The CScope exemplar lesson covering Dr. King has the students compare a brown egg and a white egg on a Venn Diagram.  The use of eggs made me think of  Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.  This gave me the idea to join the Dr. King lesson and the book in a mini-unit that I call "Brown Eggs and Peace."
     I began the unit by reading Green Eggs and Ham. I asked questions to lead the students to realize that the character didn't like green eggs just because he never tried them. Then I asked the students if they liked brown eggs, and of course they all said no.  When I asked them why, they all said they didn't know because they had never tried them.  We looked at the outside and the inside of the eggs and recorded our observations on a Venn Diagram.  Then I scrambled the eggs in an electric skillet.  Each student was given 2 little cups, one had a bite of scrambled brown eggs and the other, a bite of scrambled white eggs.   The students had to guess the cup that had the brown eggs, and then we compared the taste of the eggs.  By the end of the first day, we had concluded that the eggs smelled, tasted, sounded and felt the same.  The only difference was the appearance of the eggs, and everyone had decided they liked brown eggs just as much as white eggs. 
     The next lesson was to start a class writing modeled after Green Eggs and Ham.  In the class writing it is not Sam I Am asking the class if they like Brown Eggs and Peace, instead it is Martin Luther King.  We then turned our writing into a digital storybook.