Remembrance Day for Montreal children

Remembrance Day is celebrated in Montreal's schools every year, as it is in schools across the country. Your kids probably come home wearing poppies and reciting "In Flanders Fields." They may also look forward to a special school assembly with singing, poems and the reading of student essays.

But do your kids really understand what Remembrance Day is about?

Peace is a key concept taught in schools today, and they often adopt it as a central theme for Remembrance Day activities because it is more relevant to our children's lives than the rituals from my own school days. In the primary grades especially, this strategy affords a busy teacher opportunities to reinforce cooperation in the classroom, to teach conflict resolution skills and fulfill requirements for anti-bullying curricula.

While it is appropriate for schools to focus on peace, there is something to be said for teaching our children the traditional rituals of Remembrance. We lose more of our veterans yearly, and even simple rituals like singing the national anthem are now little practiced in our schools.

It is worth preserving the emotional and cultural ties to traditions of the past, especially for the English speaking minority living in the Montreal area. Those of us who have grown up in Quebec after the Quiet Revolution often have as much difficulty in describing our cultural identity as Elvis Gratton and our children are no exception.

Observing Remembrance Day can help us to reconnect with the Canada of yesteryear. Children love ritual, and will take to it very easily if given the chance. Discuss the meaning of Remembrance Day as soon as your children show an interest in it. For some children like my son, it is enough to simply think of there being a "Poppy Day." Children with a little more understanding can learn about the poppy being a symbol we wear to honour those who have gone before.

As children grow older they will delight in hearing stories of Canada's past and in listening to songs of Remembrance. Watching a Remembrance ceremony on television allows them to ask questions or make observations without disturbing anyone, and gives them practice keeping the two minutes' silence.

Talking about relatives who lived during war time and doing genealogical research makes these far away and long ago times suddenly much more relevant for a child. A few years ago my daughter, then ten years old, and I discovered a great-uncle's WWI enlistment record online. I don't think even my mother had thought much about her uncle having served in the Great War. We all found it fascinating, and this opened up a whole series of related investigations into our family's past, uniting three generations living in two provinces and investigating several different branches of our family.