Elementary Schoolers, Meet Media Literacy

In a world of media saturation, children today are not future consumers of information and goods, but targeted participants involved in a game in which they don’t know the rules or even that they are playing, yet one that will affect them throughout their lives. This teaching manual will help educators to not only introduce the concepts of economics, financial literacy, and media literacy to elementary students but supplies lessons designed to provide hands-on experiences recognizing, deconstructing, evaluating, and choosing for themselves whether to accept the tangible product or intangible message offered. The lessons help students to build a toolbox of analytical skills that they can carry with them and develop further throughout the rest of their lives to distinguish information from persuasion, from what people tell them they should believe to what the students, through critical thinking, decide is worthy of their belief.

After being a teacher and administrator in elementary school classrooms for 34 years, the major thing I see that has not changed in education is the need for students to have learning that is relevant to their real lives. This enables the student to truly internalize and retain the learning. Children are consumers more than ever before. Yet elementary school curricula omits standards for teaching basic economics, or any understanding of marketing. This book provides lessons and the reasoning supporting them. Students will benefit if teachers, principals, and curriculum directors read it.--Mackie Seid Kazdoy, elementary school teacher, counselor, and principal, All it takes is a few minutes looking around a crowded family restaurant at the kids plugged into their devices or watching the onslaught of repetitive and targeted commercials during a children's show on TV to see the media and marketing machine at work on our most impressionable youths while adults are immersed in their own devices answering work emails or engaging in online social gamesmanship. Wasserman and Loveland's book is geared to give elementary school teachers and even parents valuable tools to teach kids how to be thoughtful and skeptical consumers of the products and ideas of marketers competing for first dibs at these future spenders. Easy to digest theory and practical lessons make this book not only a fun read, but a necessary resource for those who are concerned about the effects of media messaging on their children.--Brett Tossell, educational consultant in Dallas, Texas, Wasserman and Loveland have created a fun, easy, and user-friendly way to introduce economics to elementary students. This is a topic that is very difficult to introduce and even harder to make interesting and fun! This book does it all.--Mark Lamoreaux, English teacher and language therapist in Dallas, Texas

Jim Wasserman, a former business litigation attorney, has spent the last 25 years teaching media literacy, economics, government, and history. Jim currently lives in Granada, Spain, where he writes on media literacy, economics, and finance. Jim dreamed of a Hemingway-like life of writing in Spain, and so far to that end has amassed a houseful of cats.David W. Loveland’s liberal arts education of studying ancient language, culture, religion, and literature have been instrumental in understanding the effects of media literacy through time. A career educator living in Dallas, Texas, Dave teaches 8th grade Humanities with an emphasis on American history and language arts.