Unit 7 of 12 · Money and the world · about 3 weeks

Information and Media Literacy: How do I know what to believe?

By · Published

Children now meet more information before breakfast than their grandparents did in a week, much of it designed to hold their attention rather than inform them, and some of it generated by AI. The skill that matters is not memorizing facts but judging sources.

Researchers who studied professional fact-checkers found they do something most people do not: they leave the page almost immediately and check what others say about the source. That habit can be taught to a nine-year-old.

Real or fake?

  1. Show five headlines or images — some real, some false, one made by an AI image tool.
  2. Ask each child to sort them into true and false and give a confidence score.
  3. Reveal the answers, then ask how they decided. Most will say "it looked real" or "it sounded right."
  4. Introduce lateral reading: open a new tab and look up who is behind the source before reading it.

Core ideas

  • Ask three questions: Who is behind this? What is the evidence? What do other sources say?
  • Lateral reading — checking the source elsewhere — beats studying the page itself.
  • News, opinion, advertising and entertainment are different things that often look alike.
  • Emotional headlines are built to be shared; strong emotion is a signal to slow down.
  • Images and video can be edited or generated; look for an original source.

Activities

Lateral-reading race

Give a website about a health or science claim. One child reads it carefully; another spends the same time searching for who runs it. Compare what each learned.

Ad or article?

Find sponsored content in a magazine, a website and a video. Find the small label that gives it away.

Make a fake (to see how)

Older students write a misleading but technically true headline about a family event, then explain which bias it exploits.

One lesson, three outputs

Grades K–2 (ages 5–8)

"Who made this, and why?" for picture books, cereal-box ads and kids' videos. Practice spotting ads.

Grades 3–5 (ages 8–11)

Learn the three questions and lateral reading, and sort real and false headlines with explanations.

Grades 6–8 (ages 11–14)

Fact-check a viral claim fully and write up the trail of sources; analyze a news story's framing; discuss how AI-generated text and images change the rules.

The family question

Who wants me to believe this, and why?

Thinking Journal prompt

What did I see this week that I believed at first? How did I check it?

Free resources