In a world of media saturation, children today are not future consumers of information and goods, but targeted participants involved in a game in which they don't know the rules or even that they are playing, yet one that will affect them throughout their lives. This teaching manual will help educators to not only introduce the concepts of economics, financial literacy, and media literacy to elementary students but supplies lessons designed to provide hands-on experiences recognizing, deconstructing, evaluating, and choosing for themselves whether to accept the tangible product or intangible message offered. The lessons help students to build a toolbox of analytical skills that they can carry with them and develop further throughout the rest of their lives to distinguish information from persuasion, from what people tell them they should believe to what the students, through critical thinking, decide is worthy of their belief.

Jim Wasserman, a former business litigation attorney, has spent the last 25 years teaching media literacy, economics, government, and history. Jim currently lives in Granada, Spain, where he writes on media literacy, economics, and finance. Jim dreamed of a Hemingway-like life of writing in Spain, and so far to that end has amassed a houseful of cats.




David W. Loveland's liberal arts education of studying ancient language, culture, religion, and literature have been instrumental in understanding the effects of media literacy through time. A career educator living in Dallas, Texas, Dave teaches 8th grade Humanities with an emphasis on American history and language arts.