Do Your Year 1 and Year 2 Students Know the Difference Between a Commemoration and a Celebration This ANZAC Day?
- TechTeacherPto3
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Do your students know the difference between a commemoration and a celebration?
As ANZAC Day approaches, it's worth checking whether your class really understands what makes some events solemn and others joyful.
Ask a Year 1 or 2 student what's happening on ANZAC Day, and they'll often say something like "it's a special day" or "it's when we remember the soldiers." That's a good start. But push a little further and ask "is it a celebration?" and things get murkier.
This isn't a failure on the students' part. The distinction between a commemoration and a celebration is genuinely tricky, especially when both involve community gatherings, special foods, and time off school. From the outside, they can look very similar. Without explicit teaching, many kids lump them together as simply "important days."
In the lead-up to ANZAC Day, that confusion matters.
We want students to understand why we stand quietly at the dawn service, why we don't say "Happy ANZAC Day," and why this event feels different from a birthday party or Chinese New Year. That understanding doesn't just happen. It needs to be taught.
The vocabulary gap
Part of the challenge is language.
Commemoration is a big word for a six-year-old, and even celebration is more nuanced than it first appears. Without the right vocabulary, students can't talk about these events clearly, let alone write about them in their HASS workbooks.
Building this knowledge takes time, and that's exactly the kind of planning that eats into your afternoons. Finding age-appropriate fact sheets, creating sorting tasks, differentiating for your EAL/D learners, and sourcing images. It adds up fast, especially for a unit that spans multiple events across the whole school year.
"This resource was great at explaining the difference between a celebration and a commemoration. Clear and explicit activities!"
A ready-to-teach solution
The Commemorations and Celebrations unit pack is designed specifically for Year 1 and Year 2 teachers who need a complete, print-and-go HASS resource without the hours of prep.
The pack covers eight significant days and is colour-coded throughout so students can immediately see the difference between a commemoration and a celebration. That colour coding runs through every fact sheet, sorting activity, and worksheet, so students can self-check with confidence, and you spend less time on marking.
The pack includes 13 flexible lesson plans where you simply pick the events and activities that suit your class.
Fact sheets come in both colour and black and white, so you can use them as posters, reading group resources, or workbook pages.
There are two levels of sorting activity, a word version and a picture version, making differentiation straightforward for EAL/D learners.
Vocabulary word wall cards build the key HASS language students need for discussion and writing tasks.
The eight events covered are ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day, National Sorry Day, NAIDOC Week, Diwali, Chinese New Year, St Patrick's Day, and Independence Day, giving you scope to use this pack across the whole school year, not just in April.
Perfect timing for ANZAC Day
With ANZAC Day in April, now is the ideal time to build this understanding in your classroom. Starting with a clear definition lesson about what a commemoration is and how it differs from a celebration gives students the conceptual framework they need before you dive into ANZAC Day itself.
The pack includes dedicated definition fact sheets for both terms, a comparison sheet looking at how Remembrance Day is observed across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US, and a range of activities that move students from recognition to understanding to independent writing.
"My students enjoyed using this resource in our Celebrations and Commemorations unit. The information was clear for research purposes and they made for a good classroom display."
Whether you are teaching a whole class, running small groups, or setting up independent work, the pack works across all three. And if you ever need a relief teacher to step in, the lesson plans are fully self-explanatory and ready to go.
Less planning, more teaching
You don't need to spend a Sunday afternoon building a unit from scratch.
The Commemorations and Celebrations pack gives you everything in one place: fact sheets, sorting tasks, worksheets, word wall cards, colouring pages, and answer sheets, so you can walk into class prepared and confident.
If you are after even more scope, it is also available as part of the Historic Commemoration Resources Bundle at 30% off.