100 Family Media Literacy Activities, Ages Pre-School through Teen Years

Are You a “High Hopes” Parent?

Attending to Our Children’s Attention Span

Building the Foundation for Resiliency Skills

Live and Play in Your World: Stimulus Addiction and the Growing Brain

Looking for Meaning in All the Right Places

Parenting Today: The World Has Changed, Have We?

Parenting as a Living System

Reading the Screen

Screen Time and Obesity

Screen Violence: Impact on Self as Relational Being

Teaching Children Gratefulness

100 Family Media Literacy Activities (cont.)

14.       Play: Who is missing?
Often what children see on the screen does not represent all nationalities and the diversity he or she encounters in preschool, kindergarten, or on the playground. While watching favorite cartoons or movies with your child, discuss who is missing—such as an older person, a disabled person, or a person of a certain race or nationality. You can also discuss what types of people your child encounters more often on the screen—young, glamorous, happy white people usually take up the majority of the visual images with men outnumbering women 3 to 1!

15.       Model discussion of screen stereotypes.
When your family watches a favorite TV program or a popular DVD, you can help your youngster identify stereotypical roles, behaviors, and attitudes by holding family conversations to involve your spouse and/or older children. While watching the program or movie, the adults and the older children take notes, tracking whenever they spot a stereotype of age, gender, or race. After watching, turn off the TV/VCR and discuss everyone’s observations. Using each family member’s notes, compile a master list of the stereotypical statements and portrayals that were noted. This discussion can be made more interesting if you taped the program (or replay the DVD in appropriate scene/s), so you can refer back to it as family members discuss the stereotypes they spotted. Your little one will listen to this family media literacy conversation and absorb important information while the others share their ideas.

20 Media Literacy Activities for Children, ages 6-10

Screen Violence

1.         Get specific.
Ask your child: “What type of violence is most predominant in your favorite shows, movies, or video games?” Then encourage him/her to keep a record of how many of the following acts are viewed in a week: threat with weapon, unwanted sexual advances, rape, murder, slap or punch, fistfight, run over or hit by a car, knife wound, gun wound, property destroyed. Discuss with your child what he or she has learned about screen violence

2.         Picture a world without media violence.
Have your child imagine that violence was suddenly eradicated from all television, movies, and video games. Discuss such questions as: “What would take its place? What would you miss? What would the general population think about the eradication of media violence? Would having no media violence have any effect on real-life violence?”

3.         Make a plot line of a favorite show.
When watching an action TV program or movie ask your child to write down the introduction, the problem, the search for the solution; the solution, and the ending. After the show ask your child to consider if the violence was really necessary to the plot. Other questions to ask might be: “Is violence shown as a solution? Could there have been an equally effective ending without the violence? Why or Why not?”

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