Olympic Commercial

I love the Winter Olympics.  I am not exactly sure why but I love the Winter Olympics. I cannot skate.  I cannot ski.  I cannot snowboard.  I can barely sled down a hill without a major injury, but I still love the Winter Olympics.  This might explain why I picked an Olympic commercial to look at today in class.

Before we could look at the commercial, I had to revisit our claim from yesterday.  If you do not remember, we had looked at an advertisement for Pop-Tarsts.

The class had told me yesterday that this ad was making two claims: Pop-Tarts are fun to eat and Pop-Tarts are healthy.  I wanted to look at that second claim.  We always talk about supporting a claim with evidence, so we decided to look at the nutritional label and ingredient list to check the evidence of the claim.

I had the class read the nutrition part of the label first.  They were looking for evidence that Pop-Tarts were healthy.  The class quickly concentrated on the amount of sugar in the Pop-Tarts.  Then I had the class read the ingredient list.  According to the ad Pop-Tarts are "baked with real fruit."  The class searched the ingredient list for fruit.  We did find fruit but we were surprised to find apple and pear listed in the fruits that we found.  Even more surprising was the fact that Pop-Tarts contained less than 2% of these fruits.  Looking at the ad you would think there was a lot more fruit in these Pop-Tarts.  Then the class talked about whether or not they thought Pop-Tarts was being truthful with their advertisement.

Now back to the Olympics.  I wanted to keep thinking about this idea of claims so I showed this commercial to the class.

Just like yesterday I had the class keep a list of what they saw or heard or read during the commercial.  The class made a great list noticing lots of little things about the commercial.  Then we repeated the process of having the students write down the claim of the commercial.  

One thing I like about looking at these claims is that students can often find more than one claim in a text.  Most of the students focused on similar claims.  One claim that I heard over and over was that the ad was claiming that it is alright to fall or fail or crash as long as you keep trying.  I love this message.  I constantly tell the students that making mistakes is alright.  This commercial I think really drove that point home with some students. The students were able to tell me they thought this was the claim because in the beginning of the commercial everyone was falling, but by the end they had become olympians.  

Many students also thought the commercial was claiming that moms are responsible for turning us into the people that we become later in life.  The students talked about the moms putting ice on injuries and helping their children off the ice and lifting little ones out of this snow.  Then at the end of the commercials you see the moms in the crowd watching their children shine at the olympics.

I think the class is doing a great job of finding claims and evidence in the texts that we are looking at in class.  

I hope that you are all having a great week.