Top tips for children from Media Smart, the media literacy initiative for UK primary school children, include asking children to say what adverts are selling and to whom, and to try guessing what will happen by the end of the show for their top three TV programmes. Adults could do this too. More ideas, as well as games and quizzes for children, are at www.mediasmart.org.uk
2. Listening to young children is always a great place to start. They can be encouraged to talk about their programme likes and dislikes, and invited to identify the ingredients that appeal to them. This is a good way to check that they can distinguish different genres, and appreciate the difference, say, between fact-based programming and fiction. It can also lead to discussions of bias and stereotyping.
3. Include parents as they're likely to value help in steering children away from inappropriate content. The plethora of television programming and use of recordings makes the 9pm television watershed less straightforward than it was.
Parents also worry about the internet, particularly focusing on sites featuring pornography and violence, and about young people's experiences in chat rooms. There are other issues too that parents may not even know exist - such as the mobile phone premium line scams.
4. It is easy to assume that young people are the experts in recent technology such as computers and mobile phones. This is true only up to a point.
Certainly many develop a high level of skill about stuff that appeals to them, such as downloading ring-tones or swapping music files. But their overall knowledge can be selective and patchy. Young people who seem frighteningly proficient in some areas can be surprisingly naive in others.
5. Media literacy exercises don't have to be passive and reactive. Children can get insight into how the media operate by, for example, planning a video based on their own experiences. Working out what they would put in a "documentary" about a trip out or event can get them thinking about audiences, selection and messages. And having planned it, the next step is to make it.
6. Children have a right to be heard. They can talk to journalists covering local news stories. Learning at first hand what a small amount of broadcast footage comes from an afternoon of filming helps them appreciate the selectivity of news coverage of other events.
