"How it Feels to be Colored Me" Zora Neale Hurston | Figurative Language Lesson

Looking for a unit on this classic essay that will get your students engaging independently with the text, discussing big ideas, and sharpening their close reading and critical thinking skills?

“How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston is a great choice for engaging your classes in discussions around race, identity, gender, and artistic expression. It’s also a wonderful essay for exploring figurative language and how writers create meaning through comparisons.

When you teach “How it Feels to be Colored Me” with this powerful lesson, you will:

• Start your class period with an engaging figurative language creative writing activity that will get students focused and thinking about how writers create meaning through comparisons.

• Strengthen your students’ close reading skills by taking them through a close reading of the essay with the no-prep questions and handouts.

• Teach these lessons to multiple levels with the suggestions for differentiation included in the resource.

• Easily conduct class discussion on the essay when students fill out the ready-to-go chart with you.

• Empower different learning styles with creative exercises, group work, dynamic discussion questions, and ideas for interactive notebooks.

• Easily teach the unit on Google Classroom using the ready-to-go instructions, links, handouts, and forms.

• Help your students to focus on the important ideas of the essay when they analyze quotes using the guide for reading responses.

• Add rigor to your lesson plans when your students analyze how Hurston utilizes figurative language throughout the essay.

• Easily review the questions using the answer keys which quote the important passages, so there is no guessing on your part as to which parts of the text are most important.

• Help your classes to better understand their own views about race, gender, identity, and writing.

Pairings: This essay would pair nicely with a unit on The Awakening, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Raisin in the Sun, Huck Finn, Native Son, Black Boy, Invisible Man, The Catcher in the Rye, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or any unit on gender, writing, the artist, race, identity, African American history, and/or the Harlem Renaissance.

Also included in this resource is my all-purpose Guide to Writing Reading Response Journals. This guide to reading response reaction journals based on quote analysis and close reading will get your students reading, analyzing, and writing about literature on their own. I have been teaching with reading responses for eleven years, and this guide includes what you need to teach your students to think independently without having to read and grade every single thing they write. You can view the full-priced version of this resource by clicking here.

There are no lectures or power points here—students will do the work themselves, with guidance from you. Rather than telling them what the text means, you will be empowering them with the confidence and skills to tackle a challenging text on their own.