Students will distinguish literal from nonliteral language and learn how to use context clues to distinguish if a word or phrase is literal or nonliteral. Students will complete two activities in which they distinguish between literal and nonliteral language in text and write their own nonliteral language.
Practice how to show, not tell, with similes in this Story Pirates video from Camp TV. Get ready to get creative and use your imagination!
This resource will support students as they interpret similes.
Students will watch a video clip with a Native American storyteller telling a traditional story. Students will use supporting evidence from the story to give meaning to oral and written texts. Students listen to a Native American folktale and later give meaning to oral and written texts using supporting evidence from the story. When learners can interpret the meanings of phrases by using supporting evidence in a text, they are using contextual clues. These learners clearly comprehend the explicit and implied information that is available in the text.
Discover how authors use figurative language to enhance their writing and explore the differences between similes and metaphors in this animated video from WNET. Discussion questions below help students to further apply their understanding before analyzing a text.
Explore the difference between tone and mood in this animated video from WNET through definitions and examples from poetry and prose. Discussion questions below help students to further apply their understanding before analyzing a text.
Explore the literary technique of imagery to see how sensory language contributes to the meaning and feeling of a poem in this animated video from WNET. Discussion questions below help students to further apply their understanding before analyzing a text.
In this lesson, the students will learn about some different figures of speech and expressions in the English language. A figure of speech is when we use words creatively in a way that is a little different from what the words mean normally. Expressions like metaphors and similes are used to add rhetorical force to the spoken or written language. This resource offers videos, games, and worksheets to help further understand the concept taught in this lesson.
An author’s tone is the attitude the author has about a subject or toward the reader. The tone is typically conveyed through the words and phrases that the author uses. In this classroom resource, the students will look at three general types of tone: positive, negative, and neutral. This classroom resource is an instructional video, and there is a worksheet and a quiz to support understanding.
Help Radly journey through 10 sci-fi levels of action. Find the barrel that matches the correct answer and blast it with your ray gun. Be careful, though, all kinds of alien bats and drones will try to stop you on your way. Pick from 7 different skills ranging from grades second through sixth in one of our fantastic robot games for kids. Skills include vocabulary, synonyms, antonyms, cause and effect, making inferences, and context clues.
In this classroom resource, students will demonstrate understanding of words by relating them to their opposites (antonyms) and to words with similar but not identical meanings (synonyms). This informational resource offers videos, games, and worksheets to help further understand the concept.
This video explains the idiom out of the frying pan and into the fire. Cooking can be dangerous and this idiom is all about trouble and danger!
Poetry offers many opportunities for wordplay and learning about language. But because poetry can seem inaccessible, many students approach poetry writing with trepidation. This lesson for third and fourth-grade students is designed to overcome student fears by using a traditional poem to teach students about alliteration. After reading the book A My Name Is... by Alice Lyne, students use a variety of print and online resources to brainstorm their own alliterative word lists. They then create a poetry link that uses the traditional poem they have read together as a framework for their own poems.
In this lesson, students learn about alliteration from picture books by author/illustrator, Pamela Duncan Edwards. Using the books' illustrations for inspiration, students write original alliterative sentences and share them with the class. As the lesson continues, students practice using alliteration to create acrostic poems, alphabet books, number books, and tongue twisters.
Bam! Beep! Zoom! Students are sure to delight in the study of onomatopoetic words through the use of comic strips. In this lesson, students begin with an introduction to onomatopoeia, which describes words that imitate the natural sound associated with an action or object. As a class, students view several comic strips and are guided in identifying examples of onomatopoeia. The group then discusses the purpose of onomatopoeia and its effect in a story before students work individually to find examples of onomatopoeia in other comics. Finally, students work individually or in pairs to create their own comic books that include onomatopoeic language. After presenting their comics to the class, students discuss the use of onomatopoeia and its effectiveness in each comic strip.
By developing a clear understanding of figurative language, students can further comprehend texts that contain metaphorical and lexical meanings beyond the basic word level. In this lesson, students explore figurative language with a focus on the literal versus the metaphorical translations of idioms. Through read-alouds, teacher modeling, and student-centered activities that are presented in the classroom, students will further develop their understanding of figurative language.
Students' vocabulary is expanded and their writing is enriched when they are encouraged to use a variety of adjectives to help readers "see, taste, and feel" what they've written. In this unit for grades 3 through 5, picture books are used as a springboard for helping students define, identify, and practice using adjectives and synonyms. They develop webbed lists and then put their new vocabulary skills to use by writing form poems.