These quick and low-prep media literacy activities will help you improve your student’s critical thinking skills, teach rhetorical analysis and persuasive techniques, and even practice public speaking! To me, teaching media literacy goes hand in hand with teaching Secondary ELA. After all, understanding and interpreting a novel, or analyzing an author’s purpose isn’t so different from critically reading a news article or blog post. Media literacy is especially critical if you’re teaching about current events or exploring topics like immigration or social justice in ELA. I also have a new resource (2023) that has 15 lesson plans analyzing pop culture short texts, like TV episodes, songs, short films, and more! It is a fantastic, standards-aligned resource that builds media literacy skills. Check out the 15 Pop Culture Analysis Activities resource here. What is media literacy?