What do Halloween costumes say?
This activity, adaptable across grades, is designed to help students look critically at the Halloween costumes marketed to them.

This activity, adaptable across grades, is designed to help students look critically at the Halloween costumes marketed to them.

In this lesson, students use fairy tales as a way of learning about the idea of genre. They explore how the typical tropes of a genre can create or perpetuate stereotypes and create a “flipped” fairy tale that sends a message that is unusual for the genre.

In this lesson, students consider the idea that a news source can be “accurate but misleading” through the concept of framing. Students learn about the different ways that news stories may be framed, identify examples of framing in a news story, then find and evaluate examples of framing in news stories on a particular issue.

In this lesson, students investigate how tobacco companies frame their products in different ways for different audiences.

This outcome chart contains media-related learning outcomes from the Prince Edward Island Grade 3 Health Education with links to supporting resources on the MediaSmarts site.

Young people today spend large amounts of time sharing parts of their personal lives online playing games, “checking in” with geolocation apps, posting photos and catching up with friends through social media. But despite this openness, privacy does indeed matter to youth, especially with their online actions being increasingly monitored by parents, educators, and corporations.

The Ontario social sciences curriculum includes expectations that incorporate media education themes. The curriculum document: Social Sciences and Humanities (2013) includes a section that demonstrates the complementary relationship between the critical thinking approach of media education and social sciences:

The Newfoundland language arts curriculum includes expectations that incorporate media education themes. The curriculum document English Language Arts Grade 9 Overview (2012) includes a section that demonstrates the complementary relationship between digital and media literacy and English language arts:


This lesson plan explores the relationship between technology and the law by examining how the criminal law responds to technologically facilitated violence (TFV). Not only will it enhance students’ understanding of the legal meaning of key terms such as “violence”, it will also engage them in dialogue about the surrounding social and legal issues and the ways in which new and emerging technologies are affecting the relationship between the law and technology. Through the exploration of Canadian case studies, and subsequent discussion, students will develop their knowledge on legal implications of various forms of TFV such as harassing communications, criminal harassment, unauthorized use of computer systems, non-consensual disclosure of intimate images (sometimes referred to as “revenge porn”), and hate propaganda. Students will use materials from The eQuality Project’s “Technology-Facilitated Violence: Criminal Case Law” database to research recent Canadian case law involving TFV, better understand the concept of “violence” and the wide range of acts that fall within TFV, as well as the available criminal legal resources and potential outcomes for those affected.