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This Lesson's Title:
A Monster of a Metaphor
creating an extended metaphor with sentences that flow
This lesson was proposed for WritingFix by NNWP Teacher Consultant Tamara Turnbeaugh. |
T he ideal "mentor text" that can be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter 5 of the book.
Click here to view this book at Amazon.com.
If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library. |
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:
Pre-step (before you share the published model): First, your students should be familiar with basic figurative language—specifically metaphors and personification. Review or introduce this topic with your students.
One great way to discuss this is to go to the attached Jeep advertisements; this is an off-site link, and we cannot guarantee it'll always be there. If you don’t have the ability to clearly show students computer images, print out one of the pictures on an overhead—preferably in color. Ask the students to what is the Jeep compared? (A: various insects.) Why did the company make that comparison? (A: insects are outdoors; they can go anywhere) Why is this image particularly effective as an advertisement? (A: it caters to outdoors people with the gear.)
Step one (sharing the published model): Second, read chapter 5 in the Grapes of Wrath. Stop after the rape of the land, just before the driver eating lunch. To promote active listening/reading, use the attached graphic organizer and have students track the various things that are compared to the monster. Have students use this to record words and phrases from the text. Possible answers for the graphic organizer: the banks eat money, breathe profits, suck the blood of the land….. The driver is goggled, muzzled, inhuman, part of the tractor…The tractors crawl like insects, dig snouts in, have iron teeth, rape the land…
You might your ask the students the same questions you asked with the Jeep image(s).
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Step two (introducing student models of writing): In small groups, have your students read and respond to any or all of the student models that come with this lesson. The groups should certainly talk about the idea development, but you might prompt your students to talk about each model's sentence fluency as well.
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Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Finally, have your students use the interactive buttons on the Student Instruction Page to launch ideas for their own extended metaphors. Let students play with the interactive buttons , or write some of the choices on the chalk or white board for them to choose from.
Before they start drafting their extended metaphors, request that they strongly think about sentence fluency and sentence rhythm as they write. Their sentences might start with different words, and they might attempt to create sentences with different lengths to achieve this rhythm. To ensure that they are thinking about sentence fluency tricks, have them use the sentence fluency drafting sheet, which can be found just below. This sheet's embedded Post-It note requires the students to revisit their own writing and rank their use of sentence fluency skills.
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Step four (revising with specific trait language): To promote response and revision to rough draft writing, attach WritingFix's Revision and Response Post-Its to your students' drafts. Make sure the students rank their use of the trait-specific skills on the Post-Its, which means they'll only have one "1" and one "5." Have them commit to ideas for revision based on their Post-It rankings. For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.
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Step five (editing for conventions): After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to find an editor. If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers. With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post-it. The "Community of Editors" idea is just one of dozens and dozens of inspiring ideas that is talked about in detail in the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Workbook for Teachers.
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Step six (publishing for the portfolio): When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block. Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here. Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.
Interested in publishing student work on-line? We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers. This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.
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Learn more about author John Steinbeck by clicking here.
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