In a world where we get so much information from the internet, it’s easy for kids to come across things that aren’t true. Fake news is everywhere, and it can be tricky to figure out what’s real and what’s not. That’s why it’s so important to teach kids how to spot fake news early on so they can grow up to be smart, informed adults. If you need tips on how to teach the topic, you may find this blog post useful: Fake news. Understanding and teaching the topic of Fake News. A guide for educators.

The purpose of this current blog post is to give you an idea of a fun elementary students project that incorporates the topic of Fake News and Digital Literacy in it. I did the project with my 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students last year for Safer Internet Day (that’s in February every year), and they really loved it! I will be doing the project every year with the new students from now on! Let me tell you about the project.

It’s all about challenging the students to create their own fake news story about a new animal species that was found, complete with a headline and an image of a weird new animal.

How to do the project

First I shared a couple of animal head pictures with the students – all of those with a transparent background so they could blend together with the other images. Here’s some example ones: (you can download all of them with lots more, to use with your own students, for free, at the end of this post)

Then the students had to use MS Paint (feel free to use any other kind of image editing software) to glue the head they liked with a body they chose, until they have created a whimsical and funny new type of animal (like a lion with the head of a toad). They could also choose from many backgrounds I provided, to use with their whimsical animal.

They had to add a title to their collages, like “Don’t always believe everything on the Internet”, or “Beware of Fake News”. They could also add the logo of “Safer Internet Day” to their pictures.

Then we made these big colorful cardboards that looked like a newspaper, we wrote “Breaking news” on top, and then “New animals discovered” next to it. We printed their animal collages and we glued them on the cardboard newspapers.

Those “posters” were hanging on my computer lab walls for a whole month! They were great and very amusing, all of the students that went into the room would first go there and ask questions. The whole activity was a great way to introduce the topic to young students, with lost of the fun factors. Here’s a few of the collages:

The project was done after a discussion on the topic of Fake News. It could also be paired with other activities and topics from the realm of Digital citizenship and Digital literacy. I hope this blog post helped you.

Here’s a ZIP file with the materials I used last year. It contains folders, full of pictures of backgrounds, animals and animal heads (all with transparent backgrounds), anything you might need. It’s a pleasure sharing it with you, because I know that even if only 1 student in your classroom starts thinking before believing, then my blog post was not written in vain 🙂