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Are you **Media Savvy**? This wiki page is about teaching **Media Literacy** to //elementary school age children//.

What should children learn about all media? Why should they learn it? How can students best construct their own understanding of electronic media?

Fourth grade students at our school begin with this //partial explanation of// **Media Literacy**.


 * Media** includes books, magazines, newspapers, movies, tv shows, radio programs, commercials, and many forms of advertising. Schools traditionally focus on books and other print media, and **Literacy** is usually limited to making meaning from these print resources. Also valuable and of increasing importance is learning to make meaning from electronic media such as video. Watching is rarely a simple matter of "seeing is believing." Digital media is constructed intentionally to convey specific meaning and often to persuade the viewer towards particular beliefs or actions. Students still need to be taught to read for understanding and now, more than ever, they need to be taught how to read video and audio and other forms of communication.

TV commercials are a natural place to expand young students' understanding of media literacy beyond print resources because tv commercials are brief, highly focused, and obviously intended to persuade. Commercials are almost unavoidable on tv, and all children in the US are familiar with at least some of the many goods and services marketed through television. Toys and food are excellent beginning points for looking at commercials as these are well-known and pique chldren's interest.

A concise definition of Media Literacy comes from Canada's Media Awareness Network, http://www.mediaeducationweek.ca/default.htm

> Young people need to develop knowledge, values, critical thinking, communication and information management skills. > It is the process of becoming active, rather than passive, consumers of media/
 * As kids interact with media they absorb knowledge about the world, themselves and others.
 * **Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and produce media.**

This is a good working definition of media literacy as it breaks thinking about media into four steps or stages.

Access Analyze Evaluate Produce

Examples of Commercials for Discussion


 * Mastercard**

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What does this commercial have to do with the product being promoted?

What kind of response from the viewer is the advertiser hoping for?

70s Toy Commercials

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Watch the first commercial. You don't need to know exactly what the toy is.

How does video make the toy seem action-packed and engaging?


 * Wii**

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What is going on in this commercial?

Who is bringing the Wii? Who is embracing the Wii?