My second grade class became obsessed with similes after reading Roald Dahl’s “The BFG”. He described one terrifying giant as having a nose “as sharp as a knife.” When my students drew their own fearsome giants and wrote vivid descriptions of their characters we had all kinds of sharp noses – sharp as a sword, sharp as a dagger, sharp as an ax. Overdoing it a little, but that opened the door to the power of figurative language. Similes, metaphors, analogies, all of these add power to writing of every genre – narrative, expository, opinion, poetry…Try these Daily Quick Writes to help your kids flex their creative and critical thinking muscles!