The expansion of emerging technologies and cyberspace has influenced children’s lives and made media literacy education in primary school essential. Media literacy includes the ability to analyze, evaluate, produce, and consciously interact with media messages, enabling the development of responsible and informed citizens in the digital age. Despite the importance of this competency, Iran’s education system still lacks a comprehensive and localized program for media literacy at the primary level, and teachers and families face serious challenges in guiding children’s encounters with media. The absence of a scientific and operational framework has led to children growing up in cyberspace without the necessary skills, exposing them to cultural, psychological, and educational harms. This study adopted a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design. In the qualitative phase, through a research synthesis of 16 selected studies, the components of a media literacy curriculum model were extracted and an initial model was developed. In the quantitative phase, a researcher-made questionnaire based on the model was developed and administered to 200 primary school teachers and experts in curriculum planning and media literacy to examine the instrument’s validity and reliability and to validate the model. The findings indicated that the model, comprising five main components—analytical skills, digital security, visual literacy, implementation methods, and challenges—has high validity and strong feasibility, and can serve as a comprehensive framework for promoting primary students’ media literacy, critical thinking, creativity, and digital citizenship. Successful implementation of this model requires intersectoral coordination, teacher training, and continuous monitoring so that it can be improved in line with rapid technological changes and achieve sustainable impact.