The new Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum released this year by the Ontario Ministry of Education is the first major revision to the subject area in almost 30 years.
Marketing & Consumerism
In this lesson, students explore a variety of anti-drinking and alcohol awareness campaigns in order to determine their effectiveness. Students will deconstruct the different approaches that have been used by various organizations to reach teens and young adults and will debate those techniques that are most likely to resonate with youth. In a summative activity, groups of students create and implement an alcohol awareness campaign for students.
This interactive unit is designed to help kids between the ages of 5 and 8 recognize the marketing techniques used on commercial websites that target children.
There's an old urban legend called “the water engine,” which tells of the discovery of a way to turn water into fuel. There are variations to the story – sometimes it's tap water, sometimes sea water; in recent versions it's specified the fuel is nonpolluting – but the ending is always the same: the invention is suppressed by the oil companies, either by buying the invention and burying it or by forcing the inventor into ruin and suicide.
For parents, this time of year can feel like walking through a minefield, with ads, decorations and music all aimed at getting kids excited about the holidays. Every year children eagerly ask Santa for the “hottest,” “must-have” toys – and then turn that “pester power” on their parents. Of course, few parents want to be Grinches – we all want to make our children happy – but there can be a middle ground between giving in to pester power and canceling the holidays altogether. Here are some tips on how to control holiday consumerism:
It’s as important for advertisers to reach the right people as it is to make an appealing ad, so they have developed many different ways of targeting ads effectively. Online advertising lets marketers match different ads with individual users. This section looks at how that’s done and how it affects kids’ privacy.
Advertising: It’s everywhere.
No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day.[1] At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.
Educate your kids about advertising and how marketers target young people