Help students explore the power of metaphor through this engaging five-day text exploration pack built around the original mentor text, The Bridge.

Designed for Years 5–6, this pack focuses on how authors use metaphors to communicate ideas that reach beyond the literal events of a story. Through Lucas’s daily journey across an old bridge shrouded in mist, students discover how an ordinary structure can symbolise hope, trust, resilience, and the courage to keep moving forward when the future is uncertain.

Across five structured lessons, students revisit the text multiple times, building their understanding of vocabulary, metaphor, inference, author’s purpose, themes, and evidence-based responses. Students are encouraged to explore how the bridge represents more than timber and nails, and how different readers can develop and justify multiple valid interpretations using clues from the text.

This pack includes:

• Original mentor text
• Five days of structured learning
• Explicit WALTs and success criteria
• Vocabulary and figurative language investigations
• Metaphor analysis activities
• Inference and interpretation tasks
• Theme and author’s purpose exploration
• Evidence-based response scaffold
• Student self-reflection pages
• Comprehensive teacher guide with answers and alternative interpretations

Perfect for:

• Whole-class reading
• Guided reading follow-up
• Literacy rotations
• Independent literacy tasks
• Figurative language instruction
• Explicit comprehension teaching
• Students will learn how metaphors allow authors to communicate complex ideas through familiar images and experiences. 

By the end of the week, students will be able to identify metaphors, explain what they represent, and discuss how figurative language contributes to meaning, theme, and author purpose.

Curriculum Focus: Figurative Language, Reading Comprehension, Author Craft, Inference, Themes, Metaphor, Evidence-Based Responses

Year Level: Years 5–6
Lesson Length: 15–20 minutes per lesson
Pack Focus: Figurative Language
Week Focus: Metaphor
Theme: Hope
Key Learning: Students explore how authors use metaphor to communicate ideas about hope, trust, and perseverance, discovering that even when the destination is unclear, carefully chosen language can encourage readers to believe there is still a way forward.