[Stephanie Michelle]

Does anyone have any great ideas for teaching similes or metaphors? I am working with a group of teachers to improve our reading curriculum (6th grade), and we are trying to compile a list of great ways to teach this. If you have anything--a worksheet or assignment or activity or WHATEVER, we'd love to hear about it.

Thanks!

[fun_friend]

I think there are lots of worksheets and such available for teaching just about anything. You can probably find scads of resources in your school if you have time to look around. I find that you can point them out when you are reading and have the kids identify some when they are reading as well. Poetry is a natural place to find simile and metaphor. I am thinking (as I watch Walking with Dinosaurs on TV) of Jack Prelutsky's "Ankylosaurus" which has been in the last 3 Literature books our school has adopted. There are both similes and metaphors in this poem. Scholastic has a poetry teaching book called "Similes You Can Eat." It may be called "Metaphors You Can Eat." I have it but haven't really used it.

I use an Evan Moor publication every day that has daily language skillbuilders. Every couple of weeks there will be a question about simile or metaphor to reinforce what you teach the students.

Idioms are often simile or metaphorical in nature. Studying idioms is fun too, and I'll bet you can find a lot of resources that deal with idioms. Scholastic publishes a dictionary of idioms. You can have the kids illustrate the literal image of an idiom in a drawing.

I've seen a model for a sort of step booklet where students pick one color and create a list of similes for it.

So the top reads

As green as...

and then there are pages reading:

grass

a frog

a go light

and so on. I was planning to try those this year, since the program I teach tries to do similes in ONE lesson. I bet you could do these as posters, or in lots of formats, and using non-color adjectives as well.

If your kids 'play the dozens', you may be able to use that, since it relies on very elaborate imagery. WATCH this one with sixth graders, since the dozens are by their nature--not real nice--but a kid who understands why it's funny to tell someone they're so fat their blood type is Ragu can understand the idea behind a metaphor pretty quickly. Depending on the kids...depending on their maturity...

[imalith]

I compile a list of metaphors, similies, personifications and exaggerations and provide them to partners. They need to cut them out and sort them.

I have 4 huge papers on the board labeled accordingly. I call students from each group to place them under the proper category. Individually, they simply tape them on the paper and read them off. We discuss them and eventually we get them all taped up in the proper places.

Next, I have them write their own. We start off with green as a frog. Then we expand on it to "As green as a slimy frog in an algea-infested pond. Another example is as smooth as ice. Then we make it: as smooth as a frozen pond in January.

The culminating project is writing their own in a descriptive paper. I give bonus points for similies and metaphors after we complete this unit.