Today I began enforcing the following lexicon in my daughter’s knowledge base: “Online Advertisement”. Here’s my strategy: Whenever she is online (she’s on Webkinz today), I ask her to point out the advertisements. If she misses any, I tell her the ones I see and how I recognize them as advertisements. We start out simple (the ads are labeled as such… see image).

I thought this might be a good start to sharing these strategies, so here goes…

Topic: Online Advertising
Time to teach: 10-60 seconds.
Ages: 5-8
Content area: Information Literacy
Method: Glance over your child’s shoulder occasionally while he/she is online. Ask to point out the online ads. Make a game of it. Strengthen the concepts by explaining how you recognize ones he/she misses. This also reinforces positive POS (parent over shoulder) experiences which will be important later.