Collaborative Project: Teaching Writing With Touchstone Books

Mrs. McGowan Grade 1
H. W. Mountz School
Spring Lake, New Jersey

Touchstone Book:
New Shoes for Silvia
by Johanna Hurwitz

Writing Craft:
Figurative language/similes
 

In Crafting Writers K-6 (Stenhouse 2008), Elizabeth Hale describes similes as an example of a specific craft technique and writes that

... specific craft techniques are the small building blocks of different aspects of good writing, such as description, voice, and sentence fluency ... they are easily recognizable in student writing ...

New Shoes for Silvia is a book my students read every year. The author includes examples of basic similes:

Silvia's new red shoes are ...as red as the setting sun and ... as red as the inside of a watermelon. 

After reading this terrific story, they learned how to write similes too.  The following examples were saved from a previous class:

Additional resources for younger readers and writers with similes are:

Seven Blind Mice
The Polar Express
Owl Moon

* Marci McGowan: Home 
© 2008 M. McGowan - All rights reserved.