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| Overview |
 By investigating junk mail, students learn to think about and question texts
in ways that develop their analytical capacities and critical reading practices.
To become critical consumers, students must develop the ability to sift through
and analyze the texts in multiple media that inform, entertain and sell, by asking
questions about what’s in a text, what’s not there, who a text is for.
Their ability to bring critical thinking skills to bear on all media— from television ads to magazine ads and junk mail to billboards—enables students to participate more fully in members of a variety of literacy communities.
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| From Theory to Practice |
In “Negotiating Critical Literacies,” Barbara Comber explains that
students come to our classrooms with many analytical skills. Our job is to identify
and engage those skills in meaningful ways that extend student’s thinking. Comber
states, “Children are accustomed to thinking analytically about power and
pleasure and listening to and producing powerful texts. The task for teacher
is help children to develop a meta-awareness and a meta-language of what they
already know how to do and to assist them in applying these resources to the
texts and situations of school life” (2). This lesson plan follows such
a model by asking students to stop and think critically and consciously about
the decisions someone makes at the mailbox, to think carefully about which pieces
of mail are kept and why. Comber’s article touches on a similar activity
practiced by educators in South Australia.
Further Reading
Comber, Barbara. “Negotiating Critical Literacies.” School Talk 6.3 (April 2001): 1-2.
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| Student Objectives |
Students will
- sort junk mail by characteristics using a Venn diagram.
- share their thought
process about sorting junk mail in the manner they did.
- discuss what the junk
mail represents using prompting questions from the teacher.
- create their own revisions of junk mail, focusing on improving or changing
the original message.
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| Instructional Plan |
Resources
Preparation
- Invite family to collect and send in junk mail.
- Sort through junk mail to
determine if any of it contains inappropriate content or personal information.
- Place
about ten pieces of junk mail into a paper bag. Make enough bags for the
number of groups you anticipate.
- Make copies of the Junk
Mail Planning Sheet. If you’ll be completing the extension that analyzes
junk mail sent to students’ homes, make copies of the Junk Mail Tracking Chart.
- Sign up for computer lab to use Venn
Diagram tool or make copies of the Venn
Diagram Reproducible.
- Test the Venn Diagram, Letter
Generator, and ReadWriteThink
Printing Press on
your computers to familiarize yourself with the tools and ensure that you
have the Flash plug-in installed. You can download the plug-in
from the technical support page.
Instruction and Activities
Session One
- Divide the class into small groups or pairs.
- Give each group a paper bag with
about ten pieces of junk mail in it.
- Invite students to begin to investigate
the pieces of mail and talking about what they find. Give students approximately
ten to fifteen minutes to explore the contents of their bag.
- Once students
have had an opportunity to examine the pieces of mail, invite them to begin
to sort the mail using Venn Diagram
Student Interactive, or Venn
Diagram Reproducible. Alternately, you can place hula hoops or rope circles
on the floor and students can sort the mail into the spaces.
- Allow students
to define their own sorting criteria, but remind students that they
will
share
their
mail
with
the rest
of the
class.
- When the Venn Diagrams
are completed, ask each group to share their mail and diagrams with the
rest of the class. Explain that as students make observations, you will note
their comments on chart paper so that the class can refer to them later.
- Encourage students to explain what made the pieces of mail similar and different.
- Once all the groups have shared, look back over the chart that you’ve gathered.
You can arrange similar comments together and add any comments that students
suggest now that they have this list to refer to.
Session Two:
- Review the information on the chart from the previous session, regarding
junk mail and the ways that students sorted the mail.
- Based on the chart, lead a class discussion of the purpose of junk mail,
based on the mail that students have examined and sorted. Use questions such
as the
following
to guide the conversation:
- How do you know what the message is about?
- How do you know what is being advertised in this message?
- Who are the people who read message?
- Who created and sent out this message?
- What types of things are advertised through this message?
- What do the advertisers want you to think about the items mentioned
or shown in the message?
- What is the purpose of message?
- Where else in the community are you persuaded to buy items, or join
clubs/organizations, or visit places?
- What techniques are used to attract my attention?
- How might different
people understand this message differently from me?
- What lifestyles, values,
and points of view are represented in or omitted from this message?
- As students discuss these issues, encourage them to point directly to examples
from the previous session that support or demonstrate what they are saying.
- Conclude the discussion by asking students to compose a class definition
of junk mail—make explicit connections to the class discussion
and examples to help clarify the definition.
- If a student does not offer the observation, ask the class to think specifically
about the word “junk” in the name junk mail. What makes
this mail “junk”?
- For homework, ask students
to find another example of junk mail that has been sent to their home. Students
can bring more than one piece if they wish.
Session Three
- Review the class definition of junk mail.
- Ensure that every student has a sample piece of mail. Students with more
than one piece can share or you can provide pieces from your own collection.
- Divide students into small groups again, and ask students to share the pieces
they have brought in and explain why they would include is as an example of
junk mail.
- Circulate among students as they work. Be on the lookout for any instances
where group members disagree on whether something is actually junk mail.
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Once students have had a chance to share in their groups, gather them again and
ask them to share any pieces of junk mail that stood out.
- Next, ask students if there were any examples of junk mail that they disagreed
on or were unsure about. Ask students to discuss why they had questions. As
relevant, return to the guiding questions from the previous session that can
help students analyze the “problem” pieces of mail.
- If none of the available pieces of mail have raised the issue, choose a piece
of mail from your own collection that can help students focus on the role of
reader in determining whether something is junk mail. For instance, a piece
of mail advertising a diaper service would probably be junk mail for a family
with no babies but might be seen as a regular piece of mail to a family with
a newborn. If student groups noted the role of readers in the sorting activity
in the first session, be sure to refer to their findings.
- As a group, look at your class definition of junk mail. Does
it help clarify the category that the mail belongs in? Does the definition
need refined?
- Explain the final project that students will complete:
- Challenge students to take one piece of junk mail and
rewrite it in a way that they think is more honest, more effective, dramatic,
or humorous.
They might focus on a different audience or a different persuasive point.
- Ask each student to choose one piece of junk mail
to focus
on from the collections on hand in the classroom. Be
sure that students understand the project before they choose the piece of
junk mail
they’ll
work
on.
- Encourage students to set their own goals for this project by completing
the Junk Mail Planning
Sheet, which they will submit with their project. If
desired,
you can work individually with students to share the goals from the planning
sheet into individualized rubrics.
- Offer the Letter Generator and
ReadWriteThink Printing
Press as options for creating final versions of the
rewritten junk mail.
Extensions
- Follow this lesson plan with A Genre Study of Letters With The Jolly Postman,
a 3-5 ReadWriteThink lesson plan that asks students to sort mail based on the
different types of letters that characters in the story receive.
- Ask students to brainstorm ways to respond to junk mail and create your own
social action project as an extension of this lesson. The resources on the
Direct Marketing Association’s Environmental
Issues page and on the PBSKids’ page Make
the Most of Junk Mail offer starting places for a project that you can
customize for your students and community.
- Take advantage of students’ work on junk mail identification by creating
a mail analysis project for students to complete for a week or more. Using
a basic chart, students can track the number of pieces of mail that they receive
each day and the categories that the mail fell into. After the time period
has passed, gather the findings and calculate totals for the class. If desired,
take advantage of the data to talk about averages and statistics. Calculate
the average number of pieces of junk mail and non-junk mail each student has
received over the course of the week; then use that information to determine
approximately how many pieces of junk mail were received by all the students
in the school. Talk about the possible errors in the information (e.g., some
of the students at the school live in the same home, some families may have
a post office box and a home delivery box).
Web Resources
- Literacy Tips
http://pbskids.org/lions/parentsteachers/activities/literacy_tips-location.html
- The Literacy Tips section of the Between the Lions website includes a section titled At the Mail Slot: Make the most of junk mail, which offers ten suggestions for reusing junk mail..
- Archived
Broadcast: “Literacy for 21st Century”
http://willmedia.will.uiuc.edu/ramgen/focus/focus020924a.rm
- NPR station WILL-AM brings current topics to the public through its Focus
580 show each weekday. The September 24, 2002, 10:00 a.m. show (archive
schedule) hosted well-known literacy expert Jerry Harste, who spoke on
the topic of “Literacy for 21st Century.” One of Harste’s
themes
was “innocent literacy” which he says no longer exist. He explains
in this archived broadcast that one of the most valuable things we can be doing
is teaching children to critique
literacy.
- The Junk Mail Explosion: Why You Buy and How Ads Persuade
http://www.col-ed.org/cur/lang/lang56.txt
- Use this more sophisticated sorting and analysis lesson plan to expand on
the activities students have already completed. For taste of the project, customize
the fifteen-item list of advertising strategies used in junk mail as a scavenger
hunt checklist and ask your students to search the junk mail you’ve gathered
in the class for examples fitting the strategies. This can be a great introduction
to further exploration of persuasive writing.
- Consumer Assistance from the Direct Marketing Association
https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/static/learn_more.jsp
- Review this consumer information to give yourself
the background information to answer the questions that students are sure to
ask. This site is also the one to point adult family members to if they ask
how to reduce the flow of junk mail.
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| Student Assessment/Reflections |
Assessment of the sorting activities in this lesson plan is primarily observational.
The following questions can circulate among students and guide discussion:
- How did they sort their junk mail?
- Was the Venn diagram constructed appropriately?
- Did the students participate in the discussion about junk mail?
- Were the students able to identify ways that the advertisers defined their
readers?
Assessment of the final project should be geared to the specific rewriting focus
that student undertake. Ideally, work with individual students to shape a rubric
for their project from the information on the Junk
Mail Planning Sheet. Ask students to submit the Planning Sheet as well as
the original piece of junk mail with their final rewritten version.
As a part of the rewriting process, students will look closely at the original
piece of junk mail and make decisions about what to retain and what to discard.
A reflective response to the project can be a useful addition. With the final
project submission, you might ask students to include a reflective response focusing
on one of the following prompts:
- What things did you notice about the original piece of junk mail as you
were rewriting that you hadn’t noticed before? Why do you think you noticed
them?
- What was the hardest part of rewriting your piece of junk mail and why? What
was easiest?
- When you find a piece of junk mail in your mailbox, what will you look
for now that you wouldn’t have thought about before our study?
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1 - Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
3 - Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
6 - Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
7 - Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.
11 - Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
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