PSHE: Remembrance Day

PSHE Dealing with loss

Overview

Guide to Remembrance Day Click here to read our guide Click here to try our quiz

Each year, people across the country fall silent for two minutes at 11am in a tribute to those who have died in wars.

Students discuss the importance of remembrance and memorials.

They learn how emotions can be expressed using mood boards.

Learning aims

• The purpose of Remembrance Day.

• Different types of memorial.

Icebreaker

Read out this story about remembering the war dead

Queen leads Remembrance service Click here to read the story

Ask the class:

• Why should we remember?

• What lessons have been learnt through war?

• What would make you fight in a war?

• What would stop you fighting?

• Can victims of war forgive the perpetrators?

• How relevant is Remembrance Day now?

Present and discuss some of memorial ideas that can be found in the Teachers' Background.

Click the links on the right for more details about the two World Wars.

Main activity

Create "mood" boards

1. Collect various materials, which may include drawings, pictures, newspaper cuttings, computer images, cartoons, words and phrases etc.

2. In groups, students create 'mood boards' for 'war', 'peace' and 'remembrance' using the materials and other art materials.

3.

They have to pay particular attention to the use of colour and shape in creating the 'mood' they feel is most appropriate for their given title. The purpose of a mood board here is to convey emotion as well as fact and opinion.

4. Students should be given the opportunity to view the work of their peers and to comment on what the mood boards make them think and feel. Students may present their mood boards to their peers to express their thinking and feeling behind their work.

Extension activity

Ask students to develop a Remembrance Day assembly or talk.

They will need to consider:

• What messages do you want to get across?

• What do you want listeners to reflect on?

• Suitable readings or poetry, possibly that you or your class peers have composed

• Music which is appropriate. Students may want to choose music that gives a certain mood, or select traditional or contemporary works. The music may focus on peace as well as, or instead of, war.

Plenary

Students present their mood or assembly ideas and give their reasons for their designs.

Teachers' background

• Millions of people fall silent at the 11th hour (11am), on the 11th day of the 11th month, which is the day the First World War ended.

• The silence is a time to remember all the people who died in World War I and II, and all other wars.

Other memorials around the world:

Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park

• It contains very moving displays of the effects of the atomic bombing.

• In front of the building is a statue called Mother and Child in the Storm and the Fountain of Prayer.

• Colourful origami cranes are left on most of the memorials, monuments and statues in the park as a symbol of visitors' wish for Peace.

Washington DC World War II Memorial

• Consists of the Rainbow Pool surrounded in a circular pattern with 56 pillars to represent the unity of the US states and territories during the war.

• Visitors will enter the sunken plaza on ramps which will pass by two giant arches that represent the two fronts of the war.

• Inside there will be a Freedom Wall covered with 4,000 gold stars, each representing 100 Americans that died during World War II.