Special Feature Lesson:

 A Beastly Trick on Buyers

Overview:
Students explore how society is influenced by people's thoughts and ideas about animals and their behavior as they collect advertisements featuring animals or words about animals.

Curriculum Focus:
• social studies
• language arts
• art

Materials:
• magazines
• newspapers
• scissors
• glue
• poster board
• index cards

Activity::

Review Special Feature and More About. Discuss students' experiences with animal-isms and ask them to consider where else they have seen animals used to represent an idea or to stir up a certain emotion. Students might mention sports teams, cars, and television programs. Discuss how advertisements might make use of animals as symbols to help sell products. Ask students to share examples of any products they are familiar with that fall into this category.

Challenge students to collect six printed advertisements that make use of images or words related to animals to sell their products. Have students cut out or photocopy the ads and glue them on a large sheet of poster board. Ask students to write a few sentences on an index card for each ad, explaining how the animal represented is important to selling the product.

When students have finished their posters, display them and discuss them as a class. Critique the ads in terms of their effectiveness in selling the products.

Extension idea:
Challenge students to come up with a list of 10 animal sayings and their interpretations. Have students share their lists as a class.