Dragonwings

I use this lesson with 7th grade students to help them improve their use of figurative language in their writing efforts. Each year I have my students read Dragonwings by Lawrence Yep. I find the dream sequence of the novel, where Windrider is telling the story of his being the physician to the dragon king, to be particularly rich with figurative language.

I provide the students with definitions of the following literary terms: imagery, alliteration, metaphor, simile, personification, and metaphor. We discuss their meaning, and examples of each term are given to the students. I then have the student (or groups of students) highlight examples of these terms in a copy of the dream segment, using a highlighter pen. Collectively, as a class, we then proceed through the entire text of the dream sequence and share pertinent examples from the text.

A followup activity is to incorporate some of these literary terms in their own writing efforts.