September 11 Lesson Plans
By interviewing family members about 9/11, students can provide material for deep and meaningful discussions.
By Alicia Johnson
Normally on 9/11, I begin my lesson by creating a journal prompt for my eleventh grade English students for their bell work. It helps to begin a good pre-discussion thought process. The entry is something like: “List the first 8 things that come into your mind when you hear or see the numbers ‘9/11’”. Next, I show the students one of the 9/11 tributes from You Tube that isn’t morbid in its photo selection. Then I dig up a current editorial featuring someone commenting on something to do with 9/11. This year I may use an editorial entitled, “Keep Faith With 9/11: Official Observances Must Not Obscure Day's True Meaning”. I read excerpts and allow students to have an open forum for discussion. They love to give their opinions.
I will only use this plan as a back-up this Friday because I am trying something different this year. I’ve decided to tie the uniqueness of the day to our current unit on Oral Traditions. It’s a great opportunity to allow students to ask people in their family to discuss the impact 9/11 had in their lives and list some of the emotions they can remember from that day. Students will collect information from friends and family members on their 9/11 experience this week and bring them to class in note form on Friday. I will divide them into groups and have them share their findings with each other. I will ask each group to share what they consider to be the most important details to pass on to their own children when they are older. I will have to see how it goes as I have not handled 9/11 this way before (I always have my backup plan just in case).
Here are lessons to help you and your class have a very meaningful 9/11/09. I love these lessons because several are from 2001 which helps make the questions they ask very real, yet still very relevant to discussions for 2009. Any one of these will no doubt encourage wonderful in-class discussions.
September 11 Lesson Plans:
In this lesson, students evaluate how their reactions to certain images have been altered by the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent world events that followed. Students then share their personal memories associated with that day and examine the relationship between memory and trauma.
In this lesson, students respond, in writing and in discussions, to statements of various world leaders about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. They then keep quotation scrapbooks, responding to various quotations about the attacks that they read in the news.