Searching for a fun and engaging way to teach figurative language? Search no further!
This figurative language stations activity is a highly effective method for giving students practice at analyzing the most important types of figurative language. Students will develop the skills needed to identify 8 types of figurative language and then explain how each figure of speech deepens the meaning of a literary text.
During the class period, students pair up and move around the classroom, stopping at each of 8 stations focused on 8 types of figurative language. At each station, they'll complete a worksheet that challenges them to explain the significance of a figure of speech as it gets used in excerpts from canonical literary texts. The opportunity to move around the room and think together with their classmates is always invigorating for teenage students. What better way to get their brains moving and their synapses firing?!?
This stations activity focuses on the 8 types of figurative language that are used most commonly in literary texts:
1. Metaphor
2. Simile
3. Metonymy
4. Personification
5. Apostrophe
6. Paradox
7. Oxymoron
8. Hyperbole
The worksheets feature over 120 inspiring quotations brimming with wisdom from a diverse range of important authors. The authors whose quotations can be found in the worksheets include Chinua Achebe, Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Louise Erdrich, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Zora Neale Hurston, John Keats, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Zadie Smith, John Steinbeck, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and many others.
In case you wish to assess what your students have learned, this resource packet also comes with 3 quizzes on figurative language. The first quiz challenges students to identity the figures of speech used across 25 quotations. The second quiz is similar but features 20 longer quotations — making it useful as a make-up quiz or extra-credit quiz. Answer keys are included!
Click on this link to learn more about this figurative language stations activity!
