News & Media Literacy 101 is free news & media literacy lessons, videos, and classroom activities for primary school provided by Common Sense Education. These sorts of lessons are really important in helping children begin to understand what news, fake news, and advertising are all about.
“News & Media Literacy 101. Teach foundational news and media literacy for grades k-12.”(common sense education)
The idea is that children begin to think critically about all of the stories and images that they can see online, begin to understand that simply because it is online it is not necessarily true, and start to understand bias, etc.
“To help students build a strong foundation of news and media literacy, use these free, ready-to-teach lessons from our K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum. With each lesson, you’ll help your students put the news in context, identify bias and misinformation, and apply the critical news and media literacy skills they’ll need to become responsible consumers and creators of media.” (common sense education)
For Primary School the resources are:
Let’s Give Credit
Learning why it’s important to give credit and how to do it when using words, images, or ideas from someone else.
Is Seeing Believing?
Learning to work out to tell what’s real and what has been created, modified, or exaggerated to become fake.
A Creator’s Rights and Responsibilities
Learning about the rights and responsibilities they have when using images, sound, videos, etc.
Reading News Online
Beginning to understand the structure of online news articles is an important place to start learning how to interpret the news that they see online.
You Won’t Believe This!
Learning to avoid clickbait, phishing, etc. when online.
Finding Credible News
“The web is full of questionable material, from rumours and inaccurate information to outright lies and so-called “fake news”. So how do we help learners weed out the bad and find what’s credible? Help learners dig into why and how false information ends up on the internet, and then practice evaluating the credibility of what they’re finding online.” (common sense education)