Help students explore the power of symbolism and imagery through this engaging five-day text exploration pack built around the original mentor text, The Lighthouse.

Designed for Years 7–8, this pack focuses on how authors use symbolism and imagery to communicate hope, guidance, and resilience. Through Hana's quiet observation of a lighthouse standing firm during a storm, students discover how carefully crafted descriptions and symbolic objects can represent ideas that extend far beyond the literal events of a story.

Across five structured lessons, students revisit the text multiple times, building their understanding of vocabulary, symbolism, imagery, inference, author's purpose, themes, and evidence-based responses. Students are encouraged to explore how the lighthouse, the storm, the light, and the journey home may all represent deeper ideas, while recognising that thoughtful readers can develop and justify multiple valid interpretations using evidence from the text.

This pack includes:

• Original mentor text
• Five days of structured learning
• Explicit WALTs and success criteria
• Vocabulary and figurative language investigations
• Personification 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 authors combine symbolism and imagery to communicate deeper ideas, encouraging readers to look beyond the literal meaning of a text and explore how images, settings, and objects can represent hope, guidance, belonging, and perseverance.

By the end of the week, students will be able to identify symbolic elements and imagery, explain what they may represent, and discuss how these author choices contribute to meaning, theme, and purpose.

Curriculum Focus: Figurative Language, Reading Comprehension, Author Craft, Inference, Themes, Symbolism, Evidence-Based Responses
Year Level: Years 7-8
Lesson Length: 15–20 minutes per lesson
Pack Focus: Figurative Language
Week Focus: Symbolism & Imagery
Theme: Hope

Scope and Sequence: Pack A, Week 3

Key Learning: Students explore how authors use symbolism and vivid imagery to communicate ideas that cannot always be expressed directly, discovering how ordinary objects, powerful images, and contrasting settings can represent hope, resilience, guidance, belonging, and the enduring human capacity to find a way forward, even in difficult times.