Friday's News - Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is always a tough one to address with our younger students in class. The concept of war to them is what they get to do on their PlayStation 4 or Xboxes when they get home from school. They can luckily turn those things off and get up the next day and do it all over again. However, the men and women that took up the cause of World War I and World War II weren't so lucky.

So how do we go about explaining the war to our students? Do we tell them the truth that greed got the best of a few men and it led to them making bad choices and thus the loss of life for hundreds and thousandths of people? While it seems simple enough to explain it this way the war was much more complicated. So it is alright, to be brief about the war because as our students get older they will have the chance to study the history behind the war. What we really need to teach our younger children is the concept of Remembrance.

I am a proud Canadian and for this upcoming Remembrance Day my class will be looking at the concept of Remembrance and what does it mean. We will be looking at those true heroes of Canada and remember their great sacrifice so we could learn about them 100 years after they fact. We will also be doing it with our Remembrance Day package that we recently created and put up on our site. Please take a look at it and help also teach this concept we need to have so many of our students learn.

An InLinkz Link-up

Five for Friday

Before we get started I just had to include this pic of Jeff in his Montreal Canadians onesie.  

This was a gag birthday gift.  He was so happy to get it.  lol.

My class was lucky enough to have the chance to participate in a very cool event put on by our local legion hall. The event was around the theme of "Why do we Remember" in regards to our war veterans. It was amazing the response and engagement our my students had at this event. We were greeted by this 93 year old piper who served in the Battle of the Atlantic with the Canadian Forces. 

We also got to hear several more veterans speak of their experiences in World War II and it was capped off with a reading of the great and stoic poem of In Flanders Field. 

Our master of ceremonies even emphasized the passing of the torch from the poem to my students. It was simply marvellous.

After getting to partake in that event my students just wanted to study the war. So we took time out of of our language program to discover components of the war and the significance behind the sacrifices made by those very veterans that they met. We created a Remembrance Day package because of this and have used several of the activities this past week. One of the activities was that of Hand Poppies which we did with our Kindergarten buddies. My grade 4s painted the hands of their younger buddies and then our Kindergarten buddies painted our grade 4s hands. Together, each pairing created the symbolic poppy together. It was great for our grade 4s to teach the younger students about the significance of Remembrance Day.

One of the activities from our package is creating post cards for Veterans thanking them for their service time. This came from the idea of instead of writing one big class thank you note for our special field trip we had several individual notes thanking the Veterans for their time. 

The kids took great pride in colouring these in and then filling out the back of them. 

We have mailed them off so that Veterans should receive them either the day before Remembrance Day or the day after. 

It would be great to see the look on their faces when they get these heartfelt notes from students who view these men and women as true superheroes now. 

My students also recently finished their famous person biography box unit. It was amazing to see the creativity put into these boxes. As well as the through information included in the summary of these famous people. It will be a fun and interesting read while marking them. 

 

To cap a busy week we completed our first Readers Bistro of the year. It was a smashing success! The students loved their "lemon lattes" (OK it was lemon ice tea). They also loved when the Principal came to sit in on some of the book talks. We even found a few recommendations for our next class novel study. 

Wordless Wednesday

This week we are linking up with Miss Decarbo at Sugar and Spice for her Wordless Wednesday.

How have you been affected by someone who has served for our country?