Introduction
If you’re wondering how to teach personification and make it stick with your students, you aren’t alone.
While identifying and explaining personification in a text is simple for many students, analyzing and evaluating its usage and contribution to a text can be challenging for them, especially if they’ve never done it before.
The following are strategies I’ve used in the classroom with my own students.
Close Reading
The most common way on how to teach personification involves close reading, an all-too-familiar analytical approach to literature that’s a staple in the ELAR classroom. Through immersion, students can see how personification adds layers of depth to a text.
There are three guiding questions I like to use with my students when beginning a close reading:
- What is being personified?
- What is the human action?
- How does this contribute to the text?
The first two questions help break down the personification being discussed; the third question, however, gets students to start thinking about just how effective the personification in the text is.
To further scaffold the last question, I often extend class discussions on our close reading of one or two examples of personification by asking students:
- Why might the author choose to personify this?
- What feeling does the personification create?
- How does it contribute to the reader’s understanding?
In providing those scaffolding questions, students are provided with an analytical foundation for personification, making future class discussions and writing assignments such as a literary analysis easier.
Creative Activities
In addition to close reading, another method on how to teach personification involves the use of creative activities.
Everyday Object
One activity—which is similar to Power Writing—involves projecting an image of an everyday item (e.g. chair, smartphone, desk) and asking students to write a short paragraph that personifies the object, giving it its own emotions, thoughts, actions, or behaviors. For struggling writers or ELLs (English Language Learners), provide sentence frames underneath the image to help guide their writing.
After students are done writing their paragraphs, ask some of them to share their writing with the class and ask their classmates the same guiding questions for Close Reading.
Personification Drawing
Another activity (and perhaps my favorite one to use with my students) is having students draw a visual representation of personification.
For example, when reading “A White Heron” by Sara Orne Jewett, one of my assignments involved students choosing one of the several examples of personification from the text and having them draw it out. After drawing and colorizing the drawing, students would then write the line somewhere at the bottom.
Personification Story
Aside from writing a paragraph and drawing a visual representation, students can also write a brief story that describes the day in the life of a personified object.
This gives them the opportunity to not only apply their understanding of personification, but also a better understanding of how personification contributes meaningfully to a text.
Personification in Media
Close reading and creative activities aren’t the only ways on how to teach personification; personification in everyday media is another medium that’s ripe with opportunities for analysis and evaluation.
Advertisements and branding are one example of personification in media. The M&M commercials are a good illustration of this as each colored M&M has its own personality and voice. After watching a few M&M commercials, students can use the guiding questions for Close Reading to begin discussing the use of personification and what effect, if any, it has on the viewer.
Animated movies are another example of personification in media. Inside Out, for example, has human emotions such as Anger, Joy, Disgust, and Pride personified; just like the M&Ms, each emotion has its own unique characteristics. Showing a clip or two from Inside Out and using the same guiding questions for Close Reading give students another opportunity to discuss how personification is being used in the film.
Conclusion
Knowing how to teach personification is the first step in helping students deepen their understanding of this figurative language. Using instructional strategies such as close reading, creative activities, and personification in media gives students a strong foundation of how and why personification works.
What are some ways you’ve approached how to teach personification? Let me know in the comments!
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