Remembrance Day Activities for Kindergarten
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Remembrance Day is an important day to teach about, but it can also can be a little tricky in Kindergarten. It’s important to gage how much they can handle in terms of talking about war and death before delving too deeply into it.
And although it is important to remember and talk about the soldiers and veterans who have sacrificed their lives for our freedom, as it helps kids understand why it is so important to be respectful during the Remembrance Day assembly, in Kindergarten I think it’s also important to focus more on how we can be peacemakers and keepers.
We usually start off by talking about why Remembrance Day was established. This book “A Poppy Is to Remember” is a great book that explains Remembrance Day in a primary friendly way.
We talk about why the poppy became a symbol for Remembrance Day and we practice looking closely at poppies and making our own representations of poppies.
Here is an invitation to create poppies with red and black loose parts:
I set out black and red unifix cubes, black flat marbles, red buttons, red gems, red wooden cubes and red pom poms.. but any red and black loose part will do!
I also left these recording sheets out so that students could record their creations and practice writing a sentence about it. There were options to write their own sentence or to trace the sentence “I made a poppy with loose parts.”
(You can download this recording sheet and other recording sheets I am sharing in this blog post at the bottom of the post.)
We also read “The Peace Book” by Todd Parr and talked about what peace means to us. We did this whole group and wrote the ideas on chart paper. Then at centre time students recorded their own ideas on these recording sheets.
“Peace is having food.”
I also set out some red, black and green paper and had the students make their own poppies out of construction paper. This is a simple, open-ended and independent art activity! I provided an example and the prompt “Can you make a poppy with construction paper?” (which I forgot to include in the photo, oops!)
We also projected images I googled of poppies on the screen at the front of the room and students practiced painting poppies. Next year, I will print off pictures to place at the tables but this worked in a pinch!
And for our wreath, we created poppies out of egg cartons. We painted the egg cartons red on the first day and the middle black on the second day. I had one of my students write “Room 105 Remembers” on a sentence strip and we hot glued the poppies on to the wreath.
The writing sheets that I shared in this post I have compiled into a freebie. You can click here or on the image below to download a copy:
I hope this post gave you some ideas on how to incorporate Remembrance Day into your Kindergarten classroom!
– Yukari
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