It seems fitting that I chose to use Fog by Carl Sandburg as the Daily Warm Up poem this week...
We've been reviewing the different types of figurative language -metaphor, simile, personification- and looking for examples in different things we read. To make the information stick, each student is in the process of making their own "Guide to Figurative Language" complete with definitions and illustrated examples. We have discussed and worked with these concepts daily for over a week. I thought they were getting it.
Yesterday, at the beginning of my first language arts class, I put Fog up on the overhead and read it out loud. My students were looking for the figurative language as I read. I told them I'd be asking each one to tell me which type was being used before they began to write about it. I wanted to be sure they were on the right track. It is a good thing I checked, or they all would have been explaining why Carl Sandburg used personification to describe the fog in his poem.
In case you are not familiar:
Fog
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on. http://www.bartleby.com
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A subtle, gentle metaphor for the children. An image that almost seems human that never actually become human and then, suddenly, it moves on off the page.
ReplyDeleteDennis
Yes, I think it was the mention of feet that threw them off. It was a good opportunity to look even more closely at the poet's words.
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