love is...

So today we started Tuck Everlasting, an all-time favorite and a book we have been working really hard these past few weeks to frame. Being that this book's theme is so heavily tied to life and mortality, there is undoubtedly endless examples of figurative language. To get students ready to engage with some of the beautiful and vivid imagery author Natalie Bibbitt depicts in her novel, we spent the day exploring metaphors and similes. 

I came across this cool New York Times article which offered a fun way to work through figurative language. I made a few tweaks but found the ideas to be really awesome. Students came into class and saw that there were 5 posters hanging from the walls. Each offered a different way of explaining Love:

• Love is a rose
• Your love is a summer's day
• Love is a battlefield
• Love is a river
• Your love is smallpox 

Students then spent a few moments coming up with their own way of expressing love's essence, having been told to only be creative. They came up with some awesome suggestions, such as "Love is a jail", "Love is a gentle breeze" and "Love is hope". After going through the meanings and a few examples of metaphors and similes to refresh our brains, we broke into 5 groups and headed to the posters to pick apart the meanings of the metaphors they featured. What students came up with was really amazing and definitely served as a powerful springboard from which students were able to start processing some of the vivid imagery author Natalie Babbitt explores in her novel. 

Afterwards, we read the Prologue of Tuck Everlasting, particularly noting a passage on p. 4 where Babbitt writes: 

All wheels must have a hub. A Ferris wheel has one, as the sun is the hub of the wheeling calendar. Fixed points they are, and best left undisturbed, for without them, nothing holds together. But sometimes people find this out too late" (4). 
Students interpreted "life's fixed points" to be a metaphor for life and death, that which we cannot avoid and which is "best left undisturbed". 

I'm excited to see what next week holds, especially since students will be running Literature Circles on their own and having more opportunities to grapple with the text independently. Additionally, I'm looking forward to having students working more with figurative language. They seemed to really enjoy it and I'm eager to find more creative ways to get them thinking more deeply about the ways in which figurative language is already woven so deeply into their everyday communication with others. ​