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 book is a teaching manual that helps teachers not only explain the concepts of consumer economics and media literacy to middle schoolers but supplies lessons for students to get hands-on experience recognizing, deconstructing, evaluating, and choosing for themselves whether to accept the tangible product or intangible message offered. Teachers can use the lessons to help students 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 is a former business litigation attorney and, for over twenty years, media literacy, economics, and Humanities teacher. He has written extensively on education generally and media literacy specifically, including a three-book series on how to introduce media literacy to elementary, middle, and high school students.