Teaching Students about Veterans/Remembrance Day

Whether you are celebrating Veterans Day, Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, you join with millions around the world who regard this date as an important event. On November 11th, we honor men and women who fight and have fought to preserve the freedoms we enjoy. The Internet can be a great resource for teachers looking to help their students learn more about the sacrifices our veterans have made. For younger students, teachers can download some coloring pages, or have their students go to the VA Kids site for several online flash-based games.

The web gives us tools that help take our students beyond the textbook, beyond the simple reading of text and engages them with the visuals of the past. If this is the kind of teaching you seek you can't beat the History Channel. On their Veterans Day site students can view a 3 1/2 minute video on the History of Veterans Day. A longer, 20 minute video, "The Story of Veterans Day" is also available as well as several other videos including information on veterans returning from war, interviews with veterans and more.

A site that can help your students become real historians is the Veterans History Project. On this site students can look at veterans personal narratives (audio/video interviews), correspondence (letters, postcards, diaries) and visual materials (scrapbooks, drawings, photographs) from World War I (1914-1920), World War II (1939-1946, the Korean War (1950-1955), the Vietnam War (1961-1975), the Persian Gulf War (1990-1995) and the Afghanistan/Iraq conflicts (2001-present). Canadian teachers have a similar resource on the Heroes Remembers site where students can watch first-hand accounts of Canadian service men and women who take us into the well-guarded and often private recesses of their never forgotten memories.
You can view more resources on American History and World History

We invite you to share your favorite Veterans/Remembrance Day sites either as a comment to this blog or a contribution at TeacherRated.com - where K-12 teachers find, rate, review and share the best teaching resources on the Internet.