Activities for Remembering 9/11

So I have spent a lot of the weekend resting.  I still have a lot to do to get ready for the week.  I spent the morning blogstalking and researching ideas for 9/11 and discussing heroes.  I am linking up with Erica Bohrer to let you know my plans for this week to get my students thinking about heroes. I am supposed to teach somewhat thematically, so I chose the Olympics for my first theme and the Election and Government will be my second theme.  I wanted to take time this week though to discuss 9/11.

We are going to start talking about the Olympics next week or possibly later this week, so thinking about ways to be heroic seems like a good transition to me from 9/11 to talking about the history of the Olympics. (On a side note, I have found a lot of great activities on TpT on the Olympics that I look forward to sharing with you.)  We may also segway into discussing heroes in literature and mythology.

I know there are some great books for kids on 9/11, but I could not get any of them at the library or bookstore.  We are going to watch the brainpop video and maybe read some articles.

I decided to do my quilt square activity from last year again where the students design a quilt square in honor of 9/11.  I added some other activities to this and you can download it below at Scribd or at my TpT store.  You can see pictures of my quilt squares at the post I did for Memorial Day.  I will show my students the examples.  We also will think about traits of a hero, examples of everyday heroes, and do an acrostic for what it means to be heroic.


This week we will also read the poem "The Heroes We Never Name" and answer questions about the poem.  Students will brainstorm and write about their hero. We will look at some quotes about heroes and analyze them as well.  These activities are on sale at my TpT store this week for $1.50.

Here are some activities I found on 9/11 last year from Denise's linky party:
http://sunnydaysinsecondgrade.blogspot.com/2011/09/american-pride-linky-party.html

One of the activities I used from that linky past year and may use again is the homework to interview someone about where they were on 9/11. This activity was at What the Teacher Wants last year.  Here is a link.

Here is a cute activity from Read/Write/Think for the students to write a letter to their hero:
http://www.readwritethink.org/parent-afterschool-resources/activities-projects/celebrate-heroes-30154.html?main-tab=2#tabs

Here are some activities from Scholastic for thinking about heroes:
http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5288

The great thing about discussing what it means to be a hero is that these activities are great for most of the Patriotic holidays.

P.S.  Don't forget about Technology Tips linky and giveaway.  Help me figure out the best way to utilize technology in my room.  I know you have lots of great ideas!
Quilt Squares& Hero activities for Memorial Day and September 11th