Download This Lesson: Advertising Wild Blueberries
Brief Description: Students will explore the role of advertising in influencing consumer choices. Students will then utilize methods employing language and visual arts to develop their own advertisements and/or commercials to promote the sale of Maine’s wild blueberries.
Objectives:
The students will:
- identify advertisements and commercials that are used to market food products.
- review those advertisements and commercials to identify the components that influence consumer choices.
- develop their own advertisements and/or commercials to market Maine’s wild blueberries.
- describe the influence of advertising on their own food choices.
Life skills:
Critical thinking, decision-making, vocabulary development, assessment, persuasion
Materials:
- Advertisements from newspapers and magazines
- A selection of publications aimed at the students’ demographic group
- A selection of videotaped commercials
- Paper and art supplies
- Camcorder and videotapes
- Computer and CDs
Estimated teaching time:
Teacher preparation time, one week in advance of teaching the lesson; two 45-minute to onehour class periods plus time for student research and creativity
Preparation:
- If needed, send letters home to parents alerting them to the homework assignment that involves tallying television commercials (see example).
- Videotape or download from the internet and burn onto a disk a series of commercials that influence consumer choices when buying food.
- Save, or have the students save, advertisements from newspapers and magazines.
- Examine publications aimed at the age group of the class and select several ads that target this age group specifically, that may be different from adult ads.
- Decide if this lesson should be conducted in conjunction with the activity in the Health and Nutrition lesson that instructs students to create a new wild blueberry product.
Vocabulary:
Advertisements, commercials, persuade, influence, target group
Correlations to State of Maine Learning Results: Parameters for Essential Instruction
| Content Area |
Performance |
Grades 3-5 |
Grades 6-8 |
| English Language Arts |
F1 |
a, b |
b, c |
| Health & Physical Education |
D1 |
c |
c |
|
E2 |
b |
b |
|
| Science and Technology |
B1 |
d |
|
| Social Studies |
A1 |
e, g |
f |
|
A3 |
|||
| Visual & Performing Arts |
B3 |
a,c |