During February vacation when other students in our district were hanging out on the couch playing video games, our students were in school working hard to prepare for out ELA state testing! I spent the week guiding fifth graders through a poetry mini-unit. Students created foldables in order to deconstruct, write, and locate similes and metaphors. I hoped that this experience would help them develop a deep understanding of figurative language as well as why authors use figurative language. I was thrilled to notice students enjoying the poems I selected for this mini-unit and loved hearing students try on their poetic voices while writing figurative language!
After researching educator websites, blogs, pintrest, and reviewing poems, I created the following pages to help me teach similes. When photocopied single sided to double sided they can be put together to create a booklet. I used these materials to design lessons where students found similes, determined the literal and figurative meanings of similes, wrote their own similes and drew images that similes evoked in the poem “Willow and Ginkgo” by Eve Merriam.