Wondering how you can help your child bring more creativity into their stories? Personification is one way that your child can make their stories much more lively and creative! Story writing that utilizes multiple tools to enhance creativity is very effective. Understanding personification and how it can affect your readers is an important concept for new child writers to understand. Writing with personification is a tricky task, but we are here to help. Let’s get started!
What is personification?
Personification is used in stories and poems to describe objects or ideas as if they were a person. This could be describing an animal with the ability to talk or describing nature in moving a way a human would. Personification must be used to describe something that is non-human in a human-like way, which means that the characteristics you describe them as must be specific to humans.
Why is personification important and when can it be used?
You can use personification in any fictional writing, stories and poems alike. Personification is important because it can create a unique effect on the reader. Often, personification is useful because it’s unexpected, which makes your writing more vivid in your readers’ imagination. Using personification to describe something non-human in a human matter will grab the attention of your readers. Knowing how to use personification is an extremely important skill!
Examples of Personification
Now that your child has the basics down, here are some examples of personification to further their understanding of the concept! These examples will also be helpful when they write your next story and decide to use personification to make it even more alive:
- “That slice of pizza is calling my name.”
- “His car engined roared as he drove off.”
- “The cat scowled at me in disbelief.”
- “The sky was so unhappy without sunlight.”
- “My heart was beating so hard, it was practically jumping in and out of my body.”
Suggested Activities to Practice Personification
The list of below activities will help your child begin practicing personification on their own because it can feel like a tricky task. Here are some ways they can practice personification:
- Use an image of nature as your subject; it could be a sunset, mountains, the beach, or whatever you’d like. Write 2-3 sentences using personification to describe what you see!
- Find a household item and use personification to describe it. You can even recruit your parents or siblings to make it a competition to see who can come up with more ways to describe it!
- Write a recipe or instructions on how to make your favorite type of food! Each step should include personification of the food or kitchen tools you use to make your favorite food. Bring your food to life!
- Imagine a rough storm taking over your town. What human emotions or actions could you use to describe it? Make a list of your ideas.
- Think of your favorite animal and why it’s your favorite. Use personification to best describe it in 3-4 sentences. Describe why you love it so much through personification!
Activity & Resource
Now that we’ve provided sufficient background knowledge on personification, we’ve prepared an activity for your child to try. This is a great first step in your child's own use of personification. Good luck!
