An ESL version of this article is available here.
You may know that every year around Christmas many cable TV providers, like Rogers, offer their subscribers a “Fireplace Channel.” When you turn to the channel your screen fills with a burning firelog. It makes your TV look like a fireplace.
Now they’ve gone even further. Rogers is offering the “Rotisserie Channel.” A rotisserie is a barbeque pole that turns, to cook meat over a flame.
The Rotisserie Channel features six glistening chickens cooking over an open flame. It also has the sizzling sounds of chicken cooking.
The Rotisserie Channel may seem like a TV show, but it’s really just a huge ad for Swiss Chalet restaurants. They paid a lot of money to take a whole channel to show its chickens cooking all day, every day. They’re hoping that people will see the chickens cooking and want to go out and eat at Swiss Chalet.
Every once in a while, a line comes up on the screen (at the bottom of the chickens) that tells people to go to a Swiss Chalet website for a special deal on chicken.
In Ontario, the Rotisserie Channel is channel 208, which is near the Aquarium channel and the Sunset Channel. If you’re not in Ontario or Canada, you can check out the Rotisserie Channel here. The chickens will be cooking 24 hours a day, seven days a week on channel 208 until late May.
Related Links
A Youtube video of the Rotisserie Channel.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
Writing/Discussion Prompt
Advertising agencies are hired by companies to make people think good things about their product. The Rotisserie Channel is designed to make people want food from Swiss Chalet. Do you think this idea will work? Why or why not? In your opinion, what makes a good advertisement?
Reading Prompt
What questions do you ask yourself to make sure you are understanding what you are reading? How do you know when you are not understanding during reading?
Primary
Identify, initially with some support and direction, what strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading and how they can use these and other strategies to improve as readers (OME, Reading: 1.8).
Junior
Identify the strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading and explain, in conversation with the teacher and/or peers or in a reader’s notebook, how they can use these and other strategies to improve as readers (OME, Reading: 1.8).
Grammar Feature: Adjectives
An adjective is a word that describes a noun (person, place, or thing). For example, the words “sizzling,” “open,” and “glistening” in the sentence below are all adjectives.
“The Rotisserie Channel features six glistening chickens cooking over an open flame. It also has the sizzling sounds of chicken cooking.”
Write your own adjectives on the lines below:
_________________ chickens _________________ dancers
_________________ car _________________ firemen
_________________ toys _________________ trumpet
_________________ bracelet _________________ computers
