Subject: Language Arts Grade: Ten

Standard: #2 Reading Comprehension (focus on Informational Materials)

Key Concept: Understanding the structural features of informational materials provide keys for evaluating their effectiveness.

Generalization: In this lesson students analyze an advertisement that has been made to look like the information in the newspaper or magazine text around the advertisement.  The goal of the lesson is for students to understand why the advertisement would be designed this way and then to evaluate its effectiveness.

Background:  This lesson is designed to help students recognize the essential aspects of information advertising.  They should know the purpose of advertising before they begin this lesson.

This lesson is tiered in process according to readiness.

All students are working with advertisements that look like the text surrounding them.

Tier I:  Factual Learners:  Knowledge/Comprehension Activity

These students are concrete learners.  They struggle with analysis activities and request help in understanding how to do a task.  They work best with few choices, but for this activity, it would work well to supply choices that you have previewed ahead of time so that you limit the complexity in the advertisements.  Their tasks are as follows: 

1. Their first task is an individual one:  choose an informational ad in a the newspaper or a magazine.

2. Next, find what is the product or service advertised.  Write down the product or service.

3. Next, locate the words and phrases that supply clear information about the item advertised.  Underline these words and phrases.

4. As a group, share ads, words and phrases, plus identify the product or service that is advertised.  Someone in the group should take notes as people share.

5. Discuss the intent of the ad.  Locate any particularly strong words or phrases and discuss the impact of these words on the reader

6. Create a list of important items to include in an ad.

The ultimate goal is for each student to know enough about the aspects of informational advertisements to be able to write an informational ad to turn in.

Tier II:  Analytical Learners:  Analysis Activity

These students should choose informational advertisements from the newspaper or magazines available.  As they break down the ad, they need to focus on the following:  1)  language used; 2)audience implied in the ad; 3) overall intent of the advertisement.  Individuals need to choose their own ads and analyze them for these three areas, citing specific examples of each.  Students should then meet in the group and share individual analyses with others.  The next step is to create their own informational advertisement on a product or a service of their choice.

Tier III:  Evaluative Learners:  Evaluation Exercise

Evaluation is the highest level thinking skill (on Bloom's Taxonomy).  It involves judgment and decision making by assessing something according to criteria.  Students need to create criteria first in order to assess ads.  Individuals should create their own set of criteria and choose three informational ads from the newspaper or magazines to assess.  They need to attach points to their criteria so that they can numerically assess the ads.  After they have completed their assessments they should meet in their group and share their findings.  Again the ultimate goal for them is to write an informational advertisement.  Their ad should reflect their own set of criteria and be as fine an example of the criteria as they can write.

Assessment:  Each group has an ad to write.  The process they use to write the ad is the focus of the assessment.  Each group needs to demonstrate knowledge concerning the informational advertisement.  But each group has completed a very different process assignment in meeting the task.  Hence, the teacher's assessment must take the common elements and the unique elements of each task into consideration in awarding each student a grade.

10LR-FAD