Poetry is all about sound and rhythm. The sound of the words, the rhythm of the lines, and the emotional atmosphere created by these elements and the literary devices poets use, compress whole stories into a few stanzas. The specialized...

Introduce your class members to allegory and propaganda with a series of activities designed to accompany a study of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Readers examine the text as an allegory, consider the parallels to collective farms...

Identify figurative language in sentences that have been pulled out of a text. Looking at the sentence independently, can you tell which technique is being used? How do you know? Ninth graders look at 10 sentences that show simile,...

Ninth graders investigate the uses of metaphor in poetry. They construct poems demonstrating the correct usage of metaphors.

If you're tired of defining allusion, onomatopoeia, and satire for your language arts students, hand out a complete list of literary devices to keep the terms straight. Each term includes a definition that is easy to understand and...

Poetry Soup, a reading and writing unit constructed by the Petrified Forest National Park, will have scholars hungry to learn about nature. The cross-content unit contains topics related to history, science, and language arts. Content...

Students analyze poems by Tennyson and Noyes. They identify examples of alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, metaphor, and simile. Students create examples of alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, metaphor, and simile.

Students engage in a lesson about metaphor and simile while using them in different contexts. They are asked to share some samples that are designed by them to other members of the class. Students practice writing them with the help of...

High schoolers find a group of words from an unlikely source and turn them into a poem. They discuss the central image in two well-known poems by Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson. They write their own short poem expressing one...

Learners will read then analyze the story "Goblin Market" then discuss themes of sex and lost virginity. There are 5 questions and a series related links to help them take a critical look at an interesting children's story. This story...

Students read and analyze several highly symbolic poems. They create their own symbolic poem, read it to the class, and discuss whether they can guess any hidden meanings.

Learners analyze how poetry can reveal themes of 'The American Dream.' In this poetry themes lesson, students discuss the elements of poetry and define imagery. Learners read 'Lost Sister' by Cathy Song and complete a related worksheet....

Ask your class to lend their ears, and eyes, to a short video that defines and offers examples of synecdoche and metonymy. Whether it be brand names like Kleenex® and Band-aids® that have come to stand for all the products in a category,...

Turn hyper bowls into hyperboles that will take away the breath of your principal and learners with the knowledge available in this presentation. The PowerPoint provides very clear and accurate information that breaks down how hyperboles...

When is a staple remover a fanged monster? In your ELA classroom when you're teaching this fun figurative language lesson, of course! Get your young writers using figurative language by making a game of it. Give groups a paper bag full...

Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers” is the focus of a series of activities that model for learners how close reading can lead to understanding. The whole class plays with the metaphor, groups talk about the author’s...

After reading "The Bullet," a particularly intense chapter in Victor Martinez's Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, class members listen to the Spanish and the English versions of "Dimelo" by Enrique Iglesias. They then discuss how the...

Ninth graders explore poetic technique and figurative language in this ten lesson plan unit. Comparisons are made between a variety of forms of poetic expressions and the lives of several poets are studied.

Students examine the use of metaphors in literature. In this literary devices instructional activity, students read poems that feature extended metaphors and compare them to the metaphors used in Don Quixote. Students then try their hand...

Students analyze Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken." In this poem analysis instructional activity, students review vocabulary for the poem and read the poem. Students discuss the meanings in each stanza, the theme, and its rhyme...

In this reading comprehension activity, students respond to 5 short answer and essay questions based on the poem "Daddy," by Sylvia Plath.

Create an abundance of understanding, as your high school learners learn to analyze multiple love poems. Part one of this resource has learners define what love is, examine art that reflects the love between Robert and Elizabeth...

Students read and analyze the poem, "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. They identify the theme of each stanza, complete a worksheet, take an online quiz, and write about a single metaphor or image from the poem.

Aspiring writers complete and discuss fill-in-the-blank cliché expressions, define cliché as a form of predictable writing, take cliché expressions and turn them into new, unpredictable ones, read poetry that illustrates writer's use of...