A Baker’s Dozen of Lessons in Advertising

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Advertising is everywhere. It’s on the TV in our homes, on the Internet at schools, on billboards as we drive or walk through our communities, in the music we hear and the magazines we read. Students are sometimes influenced by it without even knowing it. So Teaching Tolerance is offering a series of lessons that includes specific strategies for reading and talking about advertisements and their impact. These lessons help kids understand what goes on when they view advertisements and develop critical reading skills to help determine what messages to believe.

Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens is a series of 13 multidisciplinary mini-lessons that also build critical literacy. The lessons are designed for students in grades K-5 and include suggestions for simple adaptations.

The lessons in this series are short and can be used in sequence or in smaller clusters, making them more compatible with summer school sessions. They also use technology and a multimedia approach to help pique students’ interest during the summer months. The series culminates in an art project that asks students to design ads about social justice issues.