Zoila M. Brown
Subsequent lessons will focus on particular figurative language. I will set out to teach simile and metaphor. These are figures of speech used to make comparisons. Students should be able to identify and use these language devices at this grade level. They are also expected to be able to distinguish between a metaphor and a simile. The distinction between the two figures of speech is that a simile uses 'as' or 'like' to compare one thing to another, whereas a metaphor makes the comparison without using as or like. For example: "The cloud is a blanket for the sky" is a metaphor. The cloud is being compared to a blanket. Transforming that statement into a simile, one could say, "The cloud covers the sky
like
a blanket." I will use "Ten Little Likenesses" by X.J. Kennedy, found in Janeczko's
Favorite Poetry Lessons
(pages 85-86), to show examples of both kinds of comparisons. Langston Hughes, in his poem entitled "Dreams," used metaphors to compare life without dreams to a broken-winged bird and also a barren field. A good follow-up lesson would be a dialogical response in which students state their reactions to comparisons quoted from the poems. One child would write his/her interpretation of the quote and another child would react to the first student's response. Students could also think of other things that life without dream is.
The above-mentioned strategies are scaffolds for the remaining parts of the unit. By this time students would have understood the fundamentals of poetry. One important part of the structure to build literacy is reading comprehension. For the next few months (January- April), I will focus on poetry using the CMT objectives. Here, the lessons serve multiple purposes. They will be based on seasonal themes simultaneously integrating the disciplines and meeting the need for responses to open-ended questions. I will use many of the poems to reinforce concepts learned in social studies and science.