November 11th Remembrance Day/Veterans Day

November 11th is a special day, because it marks the end of war for many countries. We have peace and freedom because of the veterans that served in the military to protect us. We take a few moments to remember, but they gave up years and livelihoods to serve their countries. Many people continue to serve their countries today to help others find peace.

In order to help my students understand more about Remembrance Day, I created a presentation last year that included some videos and information. I showed them to my students today and the responses were very respectful and serious. They were very engaged in the messages that were given and they spent the day humming some of the tunes. This presentation is available for free in my TpT store. It is in 2 versions: a Smartboard version, and a pdf version.

I wanted my students to have other ways to reflect on the importance of remembering our veterans, so I created a new package for this year. Here are some sample pages from it. This package features posters and activities that can be used for Veterans Day as well as Remembrance Day. I have already used some of them and the kids have created thoughtful poems and engaged in great discussions as a result. This resource is available in my TpT store. Click on the image to check it out.

We have November 11th off as a holiday so that we can go and pay respect to our veterans by attending the memorial service downtown at the cenotaph. In order to celebrate and remember as a school, we have an assembly just before November 11th. This year it will be on Friday morning and we will have our moment of silence at 11:00 a.m. Different groups will be presenting and we will have the Last Post played.

I would love to hear about what you do with your students to show respect and teach them about the contributions our veterans made for us.