September 11th
It has been ten years since the September 11th attacks in the US.
This year, teachers around the world will be faced with the difficult task of remembering this historic event with students whose first language is not English. Many of you were probably teaching English the day the attacks occurred. I’ll never forget sitting in the café beneath the the English language school I taught at in Vancouver, Canada. I watched the footage in horror minutes before my class was about to start. Many of the students in my class had heard about the event on the bus as they headed to school. They wanted me to have answers for them. They wanted to know if it was an earthquake or an attack. They wanted to call their friends and family members in Japan, Korea, and Mexico to say that they were okay.
Did you have a similar experience? If you were teaching in the US, you may have had to evacuate your schools. What were your students doing on that day? Some of them may not have even been born. Many of them will have learned about the history from other countries, and will bring a unique perspective to your 9/11 discussions. Today’s podcast offers an audio preview from our Remembering September 11th collection of lesson plans. The full lesson comes with a warmup, a reading, comprehension and discussion questions, and a vocabulary review. Our collection also includes a lesson on the 9/11 Heroes and The Pentagon. These can be used for individual on-the-go listening practice or as a preview to the ESL-Library lessons that you use in class.
Go to the September 11th lesson.
Go to the 9/11 Heroes lesson.
Go to the Pentagon lesson.