Recently the City of Toronto started a new recycling program. It lets people safely recycle unwanted electronic equipment like TVs, computers and phones.
Before the new program, people had to take these things to a special depot. Now, they can just put them out by the sidewalk with their regular recycling bin, and workers from the City of Toronto will pick them up.
But how could Toronto spread the word about the new program? An ad agency called Publicis came up with a series of catchy TV ads featuring “Chuck” and “Vince.” They’re actors pretending to be wacky recycling workers.
Dressed in orange overalls, Chuck and Vince appear in all sorts of unexpected places doing unexpected things. They pop out of garbage cans. They wear gorilla masks. They pretend to be robots.
The whole time, they talk about how interested they are in getting your electronics – even the old and broken stuff. They yell “We want your unwanted electronics!” and “We want it!” over and over again. They are very loud and very enthusiastic about recycling.
The ads caught a lot of people’s attention. They were funny, and they had an important environmental message too. The ads also got a lot attention in the media. Canadian and American news stations did stories on them, and journalists and bloggers from around the world wrote articles about them. The ads also received thousands of ‘hits’ on Youtube.
In fact, Chuck and Vince were so popular that the City of Toronto and Publicis decided to use the characters for another ad. This time, their job was to encourage people to dispose of dangerous household garbage safely.
Using megaphones, big straw hats and funny dance moves, Chuck and Vince remind people not to put old medication, leftover paint and dead batteries in their regular garbage or blue bin. Instead, these items should be brought to one of the city’s drop-off depots for safe recycling.
What’s next for Chuck and Vince?
Whatever it is… we want it!
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
Writing/Discussion Prompt
The “Chuck and Vince” advertisements are really successful because people remember them and talk about them. Can you think of other advertisements you’ve seen that are very memorable? What makes an advertisement memorable? What similarities do all good advertisements have?
Reading Prompt
What questions do you ask yourself to make sure you are understanding what you are reading? What do you do when you get confused 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: 1.4).
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: 1.4).
Grammar Feature: Preposition
A preposition is a word that describes the relationship between a noun (person, place, or thing) to another word in the sentence. For example, in the following sentence from today’s article, the word from is a preposition because it tells the relation between the workers and the city of Toronto.
“Now, they can just put them out by the sidewalk with their regular recycling bin, and workers from the City of Toronto will pick them up.”
The nine most popular prepositions are: with, at, by, to, in, for, from, of, on. Underline these words in today’s article and see how they relate to the noun in the sentence.
