Ideas for Incorporating Media Literacy Strategies for Early Elementary
Grades (and above)
- Show TV commercials and play "guess what they're selling."
- Have children find examples of advertising in the classroom (e.g., on T-shirts,
lunchboxes, sneakers).
- Read product packages, looking for certain words (fruit, new, sugar, fat,
free), discussing the differences in certain spellings of the same word (fruit
vs. froot, light vs. lite).
- Read stories and comics that also appear as cartoons or programs or movies,
discussing how they are different in different media.
- Use products and product claims to practice categorization skills (developing
categories of products, what is violence, what is fruit - should you include
fruit snacks, fruit "drinks"?).
- Practice estimation, construction of bar charts, comparisons of more and
less by analyzing different actions and characters on TV or in movies (e.g.,
acts of violence by good guys vs. bad guys; counting the people of color compared
to white people) or in advertising (e.g., how many commercials there are an
hour, on different types of programs.)
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