Elementary Students

Detecting Ads

• Advertisements and You - This lesson from Teaching Tolerance will introduce K-2 students to different types of ads they might run into online and will help them "analyze these ads with a critical eye."
• What's for Sale? - Also from Teaching Tolerance, this lesson will help young students understand that ads are everywhere. The lesson activities will help students to "talk and think about the role advertising plays in their lives, so that they can make increasingly conscious and conscientious choices about how they will respond."
• The Impact of Bias in Advertising - One more lesson from Teaching Tolerance. Once students understand the power of ads, they are ready to think about how an advertisement might look different from someone else's viewpoint.

News Resources

• News You Can Use - Tip sheet from MediaSmarts
• Newsela - News topics can be filtered by grade level.
• Time for Kids - Kid-friendly and engaging.

Analyzing Images

• Ten Intriguing Photographs to Teach Close Reading and Visual Literacy - From the NY Times Learning Center.
• Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies - From Edutopia's Todd Finley.

• News & Media Literacy Lessons - From Common Sense Media, this latest set of lessons ranges from from grades K-12. Common Sense's goal with the new curriculum is not only to help students "identify credible and trustworthy information sources", but also to "reflect on their responsibilities as thoughtful media creators and consumers."
• Media Literacy with Tim and Moby - From BrainPop
• Tips from Edutopia's Mary Beth Hertz - "Elementary school students can look at a site that they may already be using, like Coolmath.com, and identify the ads as distinct from the content. This simple task will help them start to visually discriminate between what is actual content on a site and what is an ad. A teacher can also use this opportunity to help students understand what ads are and why they exist. You can also ask students what they think the ads are trying to sell, and why a company might choose to advertise on this site instead of another.

In the upper elementary grades, a teacher can provide students with links to both real and fake sites and give them a checklist to fill out for each site, and then have students decide which one is more trustworthy and why. Great sites for this activity are The Tree Octopus and All About Explorers. Sample questions can come from these sites, though if you are working with elementary students, you may not want to use the metaphor of crap detection (or the CRAP acronym from media literacy circles) to help them remember. In that case, there is also the CARS acronym, which has similar questions. Teachers should also have students create a list of trusted sites and ensure that they look for the same information on two or more of these trusted sites to verify the validity of the information."

• Be Internet Awesome - Google's newly released digital citizenship curriculum includes Don't Fall for Fake. As you can see from the video below, the importance of including parents in the conversations is central. At the heart of the Be Internet Awesome curriculum is Interland, a “playful browser-based game, intended for grades 3-6, that makes learning about digital safety interactive and fun.”
• How Media Literacy Can Help Students Discern Fake News - From PBS, includes video of 3rd graders delving into media literacy.
• 5 Ways Teachers Are Fighting Fake News - From NPR, includes sample activity and lesson from a classroom in Irvine, CA.

Downloadable Classroom Poster - Common Sense Education