I’ve always wanted to do a focused lesson on September 11th for my students, but I never felt that I had the appropriate tools to do so in the past. This year, I found some wonderful resources that helped me shape an open and informative discussion, craft project, and a week of social studies mini-projects for my class!

We began by watching this video, which was free and available to watch the day after 9/11. We had a delicate discussion about how people are free to feel how they feel but that it is not okay for people to hurt other people because of their feelings. Our discussion ended with me guiding our class to the idea of the phrase “United We Stand.” I decided to focus on this positive phrase in case some of my students were feeling sad after watching the video and also because I saw that it was a writing prompt on some of the materials I wanted to use for social studies time, that I downloaded from Teachers Pay Teachers. Though I did not end up using the craft from Just Wild About Teaching‘s “Patriotic Craftivity,” I absolutely loved all the writing prompts and other printables in this bundle. Those materials helped me create an entire week of focused social studies activities and discussions!

The craft project I ended up doing with my class in honor of September 11th was based on a Google search and this image from Teacher by the Beach that really caught my eye. Though my class didn’t have enough blue construction paper for a blue heart background, I found some heart-shaped templates from this fantastic website, and I had my students glue on a blue square and red and white strips of construction paper. We also painted on stars, and I told my students they could be “abstract” with how many stars were in the blue part of their art piece, though we knew from our KWL discussion of America that there are 50 stars in the United States of America flag!

Find our finished products below!