Veteran's Day

To honor those who have served our country, I decided to do a Veteran's Day theme this week. It's a difficult subject for a bunch of preschoolers, and there are few very easy books out there, but when has that ever stopped me?





Books:
 Veteran's Day by Jaqueline Cotton and Veteran's Day by Leslie Kaplan
Both of these are good non-fiction overviews of what Veteran's Day is. We talked about "people in the army" and saying "thank you" to them.

F is for Flag by Wendy Cheyette Lewison
Ok, so this is technically a Flag Day book, but it's about our country and the flag, and works well for the younger kids, so I used this. To keep their interest, we counted the number of flags on each page.


America Is... by Louise Borden
I like this book that describes all the things that "America is". Different people, different states, different ways of life, but the same country, the same flag, etc. However, it's more of a Kindergarten and up book, since it gets a bit wordy. So I looked it over ahead of time and paper-clipped certain pages together to make a much shorter book. Hey, there's no rule that you have to read the WHOLE book. One kid did catch me skipping pages, but was ok when I explained that it was a bit longer than we could do in our time.

Other possible books:
I considered these, but they didn't ultimately work for my crowd.
Night Catch by Brenda Ehrmantraut
A soldier being deployed on the other side of the world explains how he'll play "catch" with his son at home using the North Star. 
America: A Patriotic Primer by Lynne Cheney
An ABC book with a lot of extra information, and words that are just too complex for my kids.  

Activity:
I created a coloring page with poppies for them to color and typed out the poem "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae, which is as follows:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

This theme was used the week of November 8, 2010.

Next week we're doing ABC's.