4.1 Read About

4.1H The Great Water Giant

In the poem below, see if you can find four examples of alliteration, six examples of onomatopoeia, and see if you can figure out how the entire poem is a personification? What do you think the "great water giant" actually is? What is this poem describing? An actual bath or something else?

The Great Water Giant

learning guide

Complete "The Great Water Giant" activity in your Learning Guide.

Prewriting

Now that you understand alliteration, onomatopoeia, and personification, you can use them to write a poem of your own. You can decide whether your poem will rhyme (like Fossils) or be in free verse (like The Great Water Giant) and you can choose your topic.

1. Choose your topic:

  • Weather conditions: rain, snow, wind, sun, lightning…
  • Places or a non-human creature in a place: a city, a forest, a jungle, a riverbank…
  • Natural elements: water, fire (leaps, springs…), air, night, sunrise, sunset
  • An emotion: fear (grips, cries…), pain, joy, love
  • An piece of equipment for an activity: sports ball (how would the ball describe scoring a goal/basket, meeting feet, nets, and posts, listening to the whistles), ribbon for rhythmic gymnastics, football, baton, piano keys, paintbrush, book

2. Brainstorm ideas.

3. Expand some of your ideas. If you start with a topic for which you can only think of a few ideas, you may need to change your topic.

         To develop personification:

Think of action verbs for your ideas and then enhance them with creatively applied adverbs.  Examples: The piano keys sang harmoniously… /  The soccer ball attacked the net ferociously…

To develop alliterations:

Think of words you can substitute or add to develop ear-pleasing alliterations. A thesaurus can be very helpful for this. Examples: The piano keys sang the sweet sounds of harmony…  / The soccer ball savagely attacked the net forcing the goalie to surrender…

learning guide

Follow the steps in your learning guide to complete your poem.

Then, complete the Literary Devices Quiz.