Captions and Charts

ELAL Learning Outcome (Knowledge) - Features that organize, clarify, or enhance messages can be digital or non-digital, including captions and charts.

This lesson invites students to explore and evaluate the use of captions and charts in what we view online. It will reinforce how captions draw our eyes to key or important information and how charts can visually represent information and make it easier to understand.

Lesson:

Objective: Students will learn about captions and charts and how they enhance our understanding of media text.

Key Vocabulary:

Captions - a title or an explanation for a picture or illustration that describes or explains what issuing on in the image.

Charts - a drawing that shows information in a simple way, using lines and curves to show amounts. Examples are bar graphs, pictographs, pie charts, etc.

Media samples:

In a classroom as well as online, teachers can find multiple examples of captions and charts in order to help their students with initial comprehension. Educational platforms for ELAL also have multiple examples to help students understand and recognize captions and charts (ie. Edwin for ELAL) and can be used to further reinforce students' understanding of the use and importance of these elements within media samples.

Activity and discussion:

Students are introduced to the two new concepts and are challenged to find examples within the classroom. Alternately, the teacher can choose specific examples to show to students and discuss. 

Key questions: What information can you gather from this caption or chart? Does it help you to better understand what is going on in this media sample? How does it do that? (students may indicate that they prefer looking at pictures and short pieces of information to understand or they might say that  charts show information a different way and are easier to remember). Does a caption contain a lot of information? or is it short? Does it contain key ideas that the author wants you to know?

Composition: Students might create their own image with caption on a specific topic to demonstrate their understand of using limited text to convey their idea.

Charts are often created in Math or Social Studies so this could be an opportunity for a cross-curricular lesson in creating a bar graph or a pictograph or in examining maps and legends.

Follow-up:

This activity should be ongoing across multiple subject areas. Understanding and using captions and charts is a critical part of comprehension in media viewing.