Funny Business

High schoolers deconstruct advertising messages by analyzing parody ads and exploring the purpose of satire. Then they create their own parodies based on real ads discussed in class. A creative activity to extend any study of media,...

Do your class members’ questions lack depth? “Sigh no more . . .sigh no more.” Use a questioning strategy based on Bloom’s taxonomy to encourage readers to create questions that probe the themes of any text. The model discussion...

Racist, independent, conflicted? Readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn brainstorm words that describe the traits of characters in Twain’s novel and then rate these qualities in several of their favorite characters. Individuals...

Readers of Voltaire’s satire create a word square for vocabulary drawn from Candide. The first box contains the word, the second a picture or illustration of the word. The definition is written in the third box, and learners write a...

Does Mark Twain’s satire become sarcasm and does he cross the line of propriety in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? As an introduction of satire, class members view an excerpt from The Daily Show and discuss Stewart's use of this...

The New York Times Learning Network provides the resources that permit pupils to examine and then write and perform a fake news broadcast in the vein of “The Daily Show” or “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update. The generated reports...

A Rube Goldberg machine does not really look like it would make work easier. Introduce your class to Rube Goldberg with a resource that shows how his inventions make simple tasks harder to complete. 

Model for young writers how to create pictures in the minds of readers with a series of slides that demonstrate how sensory appeals enliven writing. The presentation includes opportunities for viewers to practice showing writing.

As far as languages go, binary is pretty easy to learn. Scholars watch an informative video on binary code. It explains the basics of how binary code works, and then shows how people encode colors and sound as binary code.

Young scholars examine the concept of satire by reading lyrics to a song and reading "Soap and the Campus: A Web-Site Spoof Succeeds." They create treatments for parodies based on current television shows.