PBS Kids Website

This week we have been using cereal boxes to discuss how marketers target kids. We have been looking at cereal boxes and their use of strategies such free products or toys, shelf placement, slogans, catchy descriptions, highlighting certain ingredients, cartoon characters, and even colour choice to make their product more appealing. My students loved looking at the website:http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/advertisingtricks/cerealbox_flash.html and asked that I publish it here so that they could explore it further at home.

Cereal Boxes

Next week we will begin another media literacy unit. We will review advertising tricks used in media and delve into some more specific tactics used to target kids. The unit will culminate with designing our own cereal boxes. For this activity, I would like each child to bring in one, or more, empty cereal boxes for us to analyze and then re-cover. If possible, please have them in by Friday April 24^th. 

Questioning Unit

My apologies for not having posted in the past couple of weeks while we finished up our persuasive paragraph writing unit. My goal is to post once a week in order to keep you all in the loop, but somehow I fell short on that recently!

We have begun a new unit based on the reading comprehension strategy of questioning. When readers learn to question while reading, they are learning that asking questions can lead them to a greater understanding of the text, while being encouraged to be curious readers. Readers will learn that not all questions have answers, and often these unanswered questions will help them to get at the heart of the story and to analyze deeper than those that can be answered. We call these "deep thinking" or "thick" questions in class.