September 11th was a day that I will never forget. I was a sophomore in college and vividly remember being in class in Pittsburgh when the attack happened. It was a scary day but love how our country came together after the events. This is a day we will never forget in our homeschool either.
We stop our normal history and do a lesson related to 9/11. To watch our recap of what we did in our middle school homeschool, click the Instagram and/or TikTok icons below.
First we watched a short recap on YouTube by World Watch News. This is a great channel to check out because it's a current events program designed for teens to learn what’s going on all over the world through biblically sound headlines, news briefs and feature stories. No Fake News Here!
After a google search, I found some FREE lessons at various sites. We chose one of the lessons at PBS Newshour Classroom. This is a great site to add to your homeschool list as it features daily news lessons based on PBS NewsHour and full-length video-based lesson plans all for FREE!
Since the boys are HUGE Marvel fans, we chose the lesson plan: Teaching 9/11 Through Comics. Plus, all we needed for this lesson was a computer with Internet access.
We never knew Marvel headquarters was only 3.5 miles away from Ground Zero. We also didn't know that because of this impacting their lives dramatically, they wanted to do something through comics to commemorate the day. The boys had never heard of this comic that was written after September 11, 2001.
The lesson had us look at the opening picture from "Amazing Spider-Man (2001) #36. Spider-Man is at ground zero shortly after the towers collapsed. Only the artwork appears in the panel below, but in the original comic Spider-Man narrates, “…God. Some things are beyond words. Beyond comprehension. Beyond forgiveness.”
We then had a great discussion about how Spider-Man must have felt and how it relates to how Americans felt that day.
Then on YouTube through SYFY Wire, we watched a panel discussion with some of the comic developers to dive deepers into the reasoning for why they created the comic.
Finally, we watched the dramatic performance of Amazing Spider-Man #36 on YouTube.
