In our media-saturated world, kids are constantly bombarded by messages, images, opinions and ideas. Add the Internet, Web, email and wireless devices into the mix, and it's difficult for any of us to escape the information—and misinformation—glut.

Adults increasingly are finding that they need to teach the important skills of analyzing messages and information for validity and bias. Analyzing and assessing sources is an essential part of all inquiry-based learning projects, but our multimedia world means that we have to teach kids not just how to assess data and arguments, but also how to discern emotional appeals made through pictures, music and video. This important topic is too big to thoroughly cover here, but we can give you a few pointers and resources for further explanation:

• When we teach how to do photography, we're also teaching kids to really look at the images they see. They come to understand the emotional effects inherent in a photographer's choices about angle, focus and other aesthetic elements.

• When we teach image-editing programs like PhotoShop, we show kids how images can be changed to distort the truth or fabricate untruths.

• When we teach about video, kids learn more about the differences between reality and acting and how subconscious elements like music or setting can alter the emotional reactions to a scene.

Just as we try to teach kids to read with deeper awareness and conscious analysis, in a visual world we must teach them to look closely at the images that sometimes pass by them in a flash. You can use some of the following activities to reinforce those skills:

• Bring photographs from newspapers and magazines to class occasionally for brief discussions about what they show and mean. Combine this activity with vocabulary exercises in which you show the kids a picture and ask them to write as many words as they can to describe the picture or its effects. Do the same thing with TV commercials or bits from TV newscasts.

• Show kids photos and ask them to write captions for them.

• Take a photograph that has emotional power and make a copy. Now make copies that show just parts of the image. Make several more copies that show a gradually larger area of the image from each of the focal points, until you have the entire image showing again. Show the kids the smaller images, and ask for their impressions of what each image shows or means. Then show the larger images and ask for impressions until you've finally shown the complete photo. Talk about how their impressions changed as they saw different parts of the photo.

• Show kids part of a TV situation comedy that includes music and a laugh track. Ask them how hearing the music and the laughing affects their impressions.

• Find some photo-based advertisements in magazines and copy them, taping over the words and text. Ask the kids what they think the ads are selling. After discussion, show them the full ad.

• Take extreme close-up photographs of parts of everyday objects and see if the kids can figure out what they are. For a twist, use objects in your classroom and hand several photos to teams of kids and see if they can find the objects.