Ticking Mind Professional Development
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Lesson Idea: Teaching Imagery &
Metaphor With Walls
Wall: short word - but big, and often very emotive, ideas. If you're interested in exploring
metaphors with students, you can do worse than using the humble wall as your starting point.
Write the word on your whiteboard, ask your students to stare at it and think about it for while
and then write down all the feelings and words they associate with it. There's a lot of positive ones
- but often more negative ones.
There are real walls in life and there are metaphorical walls. Robert Frost's The Mending Wall looks
at both, Pink Floyd's The Wall looks at just the metaporical kind.You can watch through Pink Floyd's
The Wall on Youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPpAPIIZyo - and ask your students
to finish this prompt: The Wall is a metaphor for how society.... Sometimes we use the phrase 'if walls could speak.' If walls could speak, what would they do?
Would they scream, whisper, cry or laugh? Students can think creatively about this. Download our
resource folder of a set of the wall pictures shown below. Each picture is of a different type of
empty wall. Students need to think about what type of wall it is. Who might be found on either
side of this wall? How might they have felt about where they are? If this wall could speak, what
would it say? For an example, see the bigger picture at the very bottom.
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Students can copy and paste each of the wall pictures into Powerpoint or Word and then
superimpose a transparent text box over the top - this is how the statement in the picture
above was written. They can then write a statement in the text box. What would this wall
say if it could speak?
If you're interested in taking wall imagery further with students, they can explore its use in
a short story: While we slept something strange happened. A wall grew. And grew. And
grew. And when we woke, we found that the town had been split perfectly into two...
visit our resource shop at www.tickingmind.com.au