Veterans Day is this Wednesday. If you find yourself looking for some quick lessons to review with your students tomorrow, here’s a small collection for you.
ReadWorks is one of my favorite places to go when I need information texts about a holiday to share with students. ReadWorks has a good collection of Veterans Day articles that are arranged by grade level and are accompanied by question sets.
C-SPAN Classroom has a “bell ringer” activity titled The History and Evolution of Veterans Day. The activity features a five minute video and seven corresponding questions along with a short list of vocabulary terms. The video is informative if you can get your students to pay attention to it. It’s not a terribly engaging video. The questions and vocabular terms would work with most of the following videos as well.
Bet You Didn’t Know: Veterans Day is a video that explains the origins of the holiday and why its date of celebration has twice shifted in the United States. The end of the video includes an explanation of the differences between Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Veterans Day by the Numbers is also from History. As the name implies, the video provides a statistical overview of Veterans Day including what percentage of the American population has served in the military among other interesting facts.
Elementary school teachers may find this video from PBS Learning Media useful in providing an overview of Veterans Day. I prefer this one from Kid History.
