Why We Remember: Teaching Remembrance in Primary Schools

Estimated read time: 6 minutes

At eleven o'clock on 11th November, much of the United Kingdom falls silent. Shops pause, traffic slows, and in thousands of school halls a few hundred children are asked to stand still and say nothing for two minutes.

For some of them it's the longest silence they've ever been part of. For a few, it's two minutes of thinking about someone in their own family who is serving right now.

Remembrance is one of the few things in the school calendar that asks children to be quiet, to pause and reflect, taking time out of busy school life. The uniqueness of this event makes it powerful, so it's worth preparing for properly.

Why Is Remembrance Day on 11th November?

The armistice that ended the fighting on the Western Front during World War I was signed early in the morning of 11th November 1918, in a railway carriage in a French forest. It came into effect at eleven o'clock that morning, and the guns fell silent.

The first two-minute silence was held a year later, in 1919. It's often said that the first minute is for those who died and the second for those left behind, though that meaning has grown up around the silence rather than being set out at the start.

Remembrance Sunday, which is always the second Sunday in November, developed alongside it, so that communities could gather at memorials at the weekend.

What began as remembrance for one war now stands for all of them. Remembrance Day is for everyone who has died in conflict since 1918 and in conflicts still going on today. 

Why Do We Wear Poppies?

There’s a good piece of science behind why poppies grew on the battlefields in the first place, which many children will find interesting. 

Field poppies thrive in churned-up soil. Their seeds can sit dormant in the ground for years, only to germinate when the earth is disturbed. The shelling and digging of the Western Front during World War I turned the fields of northern France and Belgium into exactly the conditions poppies need, and they came up in enormous numbers across ground where almost nothing else grew.

A Canadian army surgeon, John McCrae, noticed them and wrote a poem about it in 1915: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row." The poem travelled widely, and the poppy became the symbol it is today.

The red poppy is by far the most common, and the money raised supports serving personnel, veterans and their families. Some people, however, choose to wear different colours. Purple poppies remember the animals that served and died in conflict, from horses and dogs to carrier pigeons. White poppies are worn by some people to remember all victims of war, including civilians, and as a statement of commitment to peace. Black poppies mark the contributions of African, Black and Caribbean servicemen and women, whose part in both world wars went unrecognised for a long time.

It's also worth knowing that wearing a poppy is a personal choice, and that some people choose not to. Children sometimes ask, and a straightforward answer works better than an awkward one. 

Remembrance Day Activities for Primary Schools

• Prepare younger children for the silence (KS1). Two minutes is a long time when you're five. Show an image(s) which they can look at during the silence. Explain that everyone will be silent, and for some people it's a very important time to remember people they love. 
• Visit your local war memorial (KS1 and KS2). Almost every town and village has one, and the names on it are local. Pupils can look for surnames they recognise, count how many are from the same family, or work out how old someone was.
• Grow poppies (KS1 and KS2). They can be grown in pots on classroom windowsills during winter.
• Research one name (KS2). Rather than covering a whole war, ask pupils to find out about a single person from their own area. This can help to make the impact of war comprehensible to children who struggle with the scale of the numbers involved.
• Build a timeline (KS2). Where does 1918 sit in relation to pupils' own lives, their parents' lives and their grandparents' lives? What about 1945? Most children have very little sense of how recent both World Wars were.
• Read ‘In Flanders Fields’ (upper KS2). The poem is short and perfect for Years 5 and 6 to consider the imagery within it.
• Make a collaborative display. Ask each child to decorate, design or make a poppy, then assemble them all into a whole-school display, such as a collection of wreaths or a word like ‘remember’. A simple activity that gives every pupil a part in it.
• Offer an alternative for pupils who need one. For some children, including some SEND pupils and those with anxiety, a long enforced silence in a packed hall is very hard. Adult-led small-group discussions about what remembrance means still allow children to participate in this time of reflection. 

Handling the Harder Conversations

Discussing war and the loss of lives needs careful thought, and it's important to consider how these discussions might impact pupils before remembrance events, rather than during them.

Know who's in the room. 
Some of your pupils will have a parent, sibling or close family member serving in the armed forces. For them, Remembrance isn't historical. A quiet word beforehand, and a check-in afterwards will help those children to feel supported and reassured during this period.

Remember that for some children, war isn't in the past at all. 
Pupils whose families come from anywhere currently in conflict may have relatives in danger right now. Others may have arrived in the UK because of a war. They don't need to be singled out, and they certainly shouldn't be asked to speak about it, but they do need an adult who has thought about them in advance.

Keep it about people, not sides. 
Remembrance works best as an act of remembering human beings. It isn't the place for working out who was right, and any attempt to go there with current conflicts should be avoided.

Be honest at the right level. 
Children can handle the fact that people died; they just don't need graphic detail. Equally, don't tidy it up so much that it becomes a story about brave adventures. Remembrance is not a celebration.

Let them ask. 
Children ask direct questions about war, and about whether it could happen here. It's fine to say you don't know. It's also fine to say that a lot of adults work very hard to stop these things from happening.

Tell families in advance. 
A brief message home about what you'll be covering gives parents the chance to prepare their child, or to tell you something you need to know.

The History Behind It

Remembrance makes more sense to children who know something about what they're remembering.

Our Year 6 World War II unit covers the causes and course of the war, life on the home front, evacuation and the experiences of people living through it. Remembrance isn’t a topic to teach for the sake of it, but the history behind it is worth proper time. Pupils who have studied it tend to bring far better questions to a Remembrance assembly, because they understand something of what the silence is about.

You can see our full primary history curriculum here.

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