The art of successful communication
This term, Ms Peck’s Year 2 students have been embracing figurative language, making powerful use of alliteration, personification, similes and metaphors to express themselves.
Figurative language refers to the colour we use to amplify our writing or our speech. As Ms Peck explained, any time your writing goes beyond the actual meaning of your words, you’re using figurative language. And as Year 2 have learnt, figurative language is a great way of taking an ordinary sentence and dressing it up in an evocative frock! And not just in poetry, fiction, music or drama, but in our everyday speech too!
Before they got to grips with their own creative writing, Year 2 explored the following lines of inquiry: What are the arts and their various forms? How can we use figurative language to express ourselves? How can the arts be used to communicate ideas and express emotions?
This prompted Year 2 to think critically about concepts such as perspective. We are all unique and the way we think or interpret things can be very different. This can be as a result of our upbringing or our belief systems.
It also prompted them to think more deeply about the function of language and why we choose certain words. It led them to unpick sentences and categorise the literary devices within them. Thinking about the effect of alliteration, personification, similes and metaphors made the students appreciate the power of language and how it can influence people’s mood and emotions.
Then came the exciting part. Thanks to the powers of green screen technology, Year 2 were transported to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, where Ms Peck asked them to unleash their imaginations and think very carefully about what they could see, hear, feel or smell there.
She then gave the students the choice to travel to their own place in time, whether it was the seaside, the snowfields or outer space, and using green-screening, create a poster of themselves in their chosen place.
After reading a passage of figurative language and asking them to identify the literary devices used, Ms Peck asked Year 2 to write about a moment in time, using their poster as a visual prompt. They were not to write a story, but simply create a moment in time, using the literary devices they’d investigated to excite, move or inspire their reader.
The students chose to play peaceful background music as they wrote, listening to a recording of Audrey playing Canon and Fur Elise on her piano at home.
Inspired by the Oh, Bother! jar (whenever something is bothering them, the students put a honey ball into the jar and let go of their ‘bother’), Saffron headed off to the Hundred Acre Wood, inhabited by Winnie the Pooh and friends, where she gate-crashed a tea party.
Shae, who is apparently getting a baby sister later this year, was transported to the nursery, where she imagined spending time with her new sibling.
Samantha took herself off to theatre. As she is nervous about being centre-stage, she peeped out from behind the curtains at the side and imagined how terrified she would feel.
Ms Peck was extremely impressed by Year 2’s evocative and beautiful use of language. And for the students, exploring figurative language has been a fun way to make the language they speak and write more exciting.
Thinking about figurative language has enabled Year 2 to better understand the skills they can use to improve how they communicate. And judging by their creative use of literary devices, Year 2 are shaping up to be powerful communicators!