Dear Families,

We did so much today in Playing with Words! We began the morning with an introduction to similes and metaphors, using some of the comparisons we discovered in yesterday’s poems. We found similes in Robert Louis Stevenson (“The moon has a face like the clock in the hall,”) and metaphors in Jane Yolen (“The shining silver moon / Is a coin hung in the sky”).

Next, we moved on from Wordplay to Artplay, creating symmetrical “Rorschach tests” on paper using paint, popsicle sticks, and string. Some incredible shapes turned up in our paintings—birds, dancers, and Transformers, just to name a few. When our paintings were finished, we used them as inspiration to write our own similes and metaphors. Later in the morning, we wrote whole illustrated poems using figurative language, worked as Poetry Detectives, and added our favorite nouns and adjectives to our Wordplay booklets.

In the afternoon, we split into two groups. One group studied analogies, and the other got a little extra practice with nouns, adjectives, and similes. When we came back together as a class, we examined David Wiesner’s Flotsam, a wordless picture book, and came up with our own stories to describe what was happening. Flotsam depicts a story about a kid who finds a camera, develops the film, and discovers some fascinating pictures—so cool, but I had a hard time explaining to your kids what film cameras were!

Optional extension activity: If your student learned about analogies today, see if they can write some of their own! If your student played the noun and adjective game, test them further by asking them to write or say the silliest noun-adjective combinations they can think of. (“Weird sunset” was pretty popular this morning.)

Additional reading: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg.