This year Armistice Day, commemorating the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 when the guns of the Western Front fell silent after four years of war, falls on a Tuesday – with Remembrance Sunday a few days before on 9 November.
The Guardian Teacher Network has some powerful resources focusing particularly on war memorials and war poetry to help schools mark these days.
The War Memorials Trust's lesson What is Remembrance is the perfect introduction for primary school students, exploring why communities have war memorials, what is being remembered and why it's so important.
Another lesson from the trust also encourages students to think about the purpose of war memorials – while it's aimed at upper primary school students, it could easily be adapted for younger pupils and comes accompanied by this PowerPoint.
Explore the history of remembrance commemorations and how what is remembered – and who – has changed over time with this resource for secondary school students.
An assembly is another great way of introducing the topic. Christian Aid has designed assemblies for primary and secondary schools about the first world war and its significance, asking students to think about the wars that are still raging across the globe today.
Another top resource from the War Memorial Trust, Why are war memorials still important? asks students to think about and investigate the role they might play in the care and preservation of our war memorials. What can we learn from war memorials? looks at what is commemorated in a local memorial, and is illustrated by these images.
Finding out the personal stories of those named on memorials can help students gain a deeper understanding of what monuments really represent. Researching names can be done as part of a cross-curricular project incorporating ICT and maths skills with database creation. Use this helpful guide on how to research the names on war memorials.
A science-themed lesson for primary schools on what war memorials are made from investigates materials used with this presentation, and if you want to explore the topic in art lessons then you can do so with primary students through war memorial designs. This lesson offers pupils tips on how to design their own war memorials.
Jeremy Deller's controversial artwork, Baghdad, 5 March 2007, which shows the remains of a car damaged from a bombing in Baghdad is a gut-wrenching way of communicating the reality of war. Explore this artwork and its significance using the British Red Cross's thought provoking activity Burnt Out.
Poetry plays an important part in remembrance. Show students this short video clip by Legasee in which George Bayliss, who was in the pioneer corps during the second world war, shares a poem that sums up the need for remembrance perfectly.
Contemporary poet Roshan Doug explores rhythm and pace in war poetry, looking at two contrasting poems about war: Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade and Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est in this stirring resource from the Poetry Society.
Another poetry idea comes from poet Cheryl Martin and is about creating poems using portrait images, which is ideal to use with images of soldiers past or present, at war or returning home.
Key stage 2 and 3 students can put themselves into the shoes of the soldiers with this postcards home poetry activity. It encourages pupils to write a short poetic letter from an imagined place, describing the place and their feelings.
Platform One by Ted Hughes and The Battle of Maldon (anonymous) are just two of 10 war poems which featured in this blog. Read their work and then stir secondary students' imagination by getting them to take the place of a soldier in battle and write a poem about what they've seen.
Teaching Ideas have shared this REMEMBER acrostic poem template which you could pop into this Remembrance Day poppy-themed writing frame from Topic Resources.
Last but by no means least, there's Christian Aid's assembly presentation with accompanying teachers' notes which explore Siegfried Sassoon's plea to remember the horrors of the first world war in his poem Aftermath. It goes on to investigate the need for remembrance in two communities affected by more recent conflict in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
• This article was updated with new teaching resources on Monday 3 November 2014