4th graders made their own clickbait headlines and they’re way better than ours

It’s a strange world online and Ingrid Conley-Abrams — a school library director in New York City — wanted to prep her students as best she could. 

As a part of a lesson on media literacy and bias, Conley-Abrams created an optional assignment where kids made their own versions of clickbait. The results were delightful, brilliant, and, at times, slightly creepy.

Conley-Abrams tweeted out some of the schoolwork and it went very viral for obvious reasons.

Conley-Abrams told me in a phone conversation that the same (frankly genius) child made both the dog and coffin clickbait articles. She said she particularly enjoyed the dog one.

“That one with the use of very on-brand clickbait punctuation, you know, inexplicable punctuation and too much of it,” she said. “I thought that genius and I would love to click on that. I’d love to know about secret dog meetings.”

Personally, I loved: “u think ur loved ones stay in here NO WAY.” Haunting, beautiful, vaguely threatening. It’s all those things.

Conley-Abrams also passed along a few other works from her fourth graders that didn’t get posted to Twitter. They, too, are awesome.