Resources for Teaching about 9/11

My daughter came home the other day talking about 9/11, which is something we’ve never really talked about at home, but is of course a big part of recent American history and something kids do need to learn about.

Whether you want to talk to your kids at home or in the classroom about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, there are a lot of great resources to help.

In my daughter’s classroom they were using a Scholastic reader, a Scholastic has a good collection of resources and lesson plans, including book lists, videos and first-person accounts, all organized by grade level.

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum also has 9/11 lesson plans arranged by grade level. The lessons for my daughter’s age (fourth grade) for instance include reading and discussing a book, talking about how kids grieve, important buildings, planning for emergencies, stories of heroes and different ways the event and people lost have been memorialized.

Add a craft by having kids make cards for first responders or make art responding to what they have learned.

It’s a heavy anniversary that holds so many important lessons for our kids. Do you talk about 9/11 with your kids? I’d love to hear what you’ve done in the past.

[Photo: National September 11 Memorial and Museum]

Looking for more Memorial day resources? Check these Memorial Day Books for Kids out.

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply