Looks Good Enough to Eat
This lesson looks at food photography and the different techniques used by food stylists to make foods look appealing in advertisements.
Buy Nothing Day
In this lesson Buy Nothing Day is used as a jumping-off point to look at the role of consumerism in our lives and culture.
Image Gap - Lesson
This lesson helps students understand how self-image can influence lifestyle choices.
What do Halloween costumes say?
This activity, adaptable across grades, is designed to help students look critically at the Halloween costumes marketed to them.
The Price of Happiness - Lesson
In this lesson students answer a brief questionnaire related to self-image, self-esteem, and advertising, and then work as groups to create and act in mock television commercials that parody advertising techniques.
The Anatomy of Cool - Lesson
This lesson helps students become more aware of the media's role in determining what, and who, are perceived as being cool.
The Privacy Dilemma
In this lesson students learn the ways that the apps they use are designed to encourage them to share more information—both with other users and with the apps themselves. They are then introduced to the idea of persuasive design or “dark patterns” and investigate whether these are used to make it more difficult to opt out of data collection on popular apps. Finally, the class creates a “rogues’ gallery” to help them identify dark patterns when they encounter them.
Watching the Elections - Lesson
In this lesson students look at how elections are media events.
Junk Food Jungle
This lesson familiarizes children with how and why “junk food” is advertised to kids. The lesson starts with an introduction to advertising and a discussion of the gimmicks involved in food advertising to kids. Students discuss the various foods they see advertised in their daily lives versus the ones they don’t see, drawing important points from this data. With this information in mind, students complete an advertising log and also choose an advertisement and analyzing its subject matter in relation to what they have just learned.
Favourite Sports and Athletes: Introduction to Sports Media - Lesson
This lesson develops a beginning awareness by students of how they feel towards, and respond to, different sports, and how the media represents athletics.