Some poems never come right out and say what they’re really about. They describe one thing, a plant growing stubbornly in a crack between two stones, and trust the reader to recognize that it’s actually talking about something else entirely. This worksheet uses an original poem built around exactly that kind of extended metaphor, giving sixth graders real practice figuring out what a poem is symbolically saying underneath its literal surface.
Download the Grade 6 Poetry Worksheet
The printable poetry worksheet and its separate answer key are ready to download. It’s a symbolism-focused addition to your Grade 6 reading library, giving students genuine practice interpreting a poem that never quite says what it means on the surface.
Happy reading.
For More grade 6 worksheets, Visit Grade 6 Reading Comprehension Worksheets.
Why Extended Metaphor Belongs in Grade 6 Poetry Analysis
Sixth grade reading standards ask students to determine a poem’s theme and analyze how figurative language contributes to its meaning, tone, and mood. Extended metaphor, a single comparison developed and sustained across an entire poem rather than appearing in just one line, is one of the more demanding figurative language skills to recognize. It requires holding the whole poem in mind at once, tracking how the comparison develops from stanza to stanza, rather than simply spotting one clever line and moving on.
This poem never explicitly states that it’s about a person overcoming difficulty or facing low expectations. It stays entirely inside the image of a plant growing despite wind, flooding, and quiet, invisible seasons where nothing seems to be happening. Sixth graders have to do real interpretive work here: recognizing that the poem is symbolic in the first place, and then articulating what it actually symbolizes, using specific lines from the text as evidence rather than guessing.
For an easier poem with a similar nature theme, younger readers can try The Wind’s Work, written for Grade 5.
How to Recognize When a Poem Is Symbolic
It helps to name a few clear signals directly, since recognizing symbolism can feel abstract without concrete examples to point to. When a poem describes something ordinary with unusually specific emotional weight, being told “nothing here would grow,” growing “roots in secret,” succeeding while “no one claps,” it’s often signaling that the literal subject stands in for something bigger than itself. A plant doesn’t typically have feelings about being underestimated or working quietly without recognition. When a poem gives it that kind of interior, almost human emotional life, that’s a strong clue the poem wants to be read symbolically rather than literally.
Teaching sixth graders to notice this signal, and then to ask themselves “what human experience might this represent?”, builds a genuinely transferable reading habit. Once a student learns to spot this pattern in one poem, they start noticing it in nearly every poem that uses nature, animals, or objects to explore human emotion, which is an enormous number of poems across every era and culture.
What’s Inside This Worksheet
This worksheet features an original poem, “Roots,” about a plant that takes hold in a crack between two stones despite being written off from the very beginning as a place where nothing could survive. Through harsh wind, sudden flooding, and long, quiet seasons where no visible progress seems to occur, the plant eventually grows taller than the stones around it, taller than anyone expected. In its final lines, the poem credits this growth not to luck or a lucky season, but to persistent, unseen effort that continued long after anyone was paying attention.
The worksheet includes four activities:
- Multiple Choice. Questions checking understanding of specific images, events, and details across the poem’s five stanzas.
- True or False. Quick statements that reinforce careful, attentive reading.
- Fill in the Blank. Vocabulary practice using words and phrases pulled directly from the poem’s lines.
- Think and Explain. Two short-answer questions: one asking students to interpret what the poem’s extended metaphor represents, supported by specific lines as evidence, and one asking them to explain why a poet might choose to explore this idea through a plant rather than describing a person’s experience directly.
That combination pushes sixth graders well past simple recall. They have to build and defend an interpretation using the poem’s own language, and then step back further to think about the poet’s actual craft choices, why this particular metaphor, rather than a more direct approach, was worth using in the first place.
How to Use This Worksheet
Read the poem aloud together, and pause after each stanza to ask what emotion that section seems to carry, frustration, fear, quiet determination, before moving into any discussion of what it might symbolize. Building that emotional map stanza by stanza makes the larger interpretive questions feel much less overwhelming once your child sits down to answer them in writing.
This worksheet fits naturally into a classroom unit on figurative language and symbolism, a home reading activity for a family that enjoys talking through big ideas, or a homeschool lesson introducing extended metaphor for the first time. It also pairs well with our other Grade 6 worksheets: “The Class Election” for realistic fiction, “The Lighthouse Cipher” for mystery, “Two Paths to the Moon” for nonfiction, and “Group Project, Party of Four” for drama, giving your sixth grader a full, well-rounded mix of fiction, mystery, nonfiction, drama, and now poetry, all at the same reading level.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of It
Read the poem twice: once simply for its literal images, wind, rain, roots, stones, and once specifically asking “what could this actually be about, beneath the surface?” Ask your child if they’ve ever felt like the plant in the poem, doing quiet, unnoticed work before anyone recognized the results. And when it comes to the interpretation question, push them to support their reading with at least two specific lines from the poem, not just a general impression, since that habit of citing evidence is exactly what stronger literary analysis requires.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there one single correct interpretation of this poem?
Not necessarily. Extended metaphors often support more than one reasonable reading, as long as the interpretation is genuinely supported by specific evidence from the text rather than a guess with no textual grounding.
How long does this worksheet take to complete?
Most sixth graders finish in about 25 to 30 minutes, including time to think through and write out the two short-answer questions.
Is an answer key included?
Yes, as a separate PDF, so you can print just the worksheet for your child and keep the key handy for grading.
More Grade 6 Practice
The speaker in this poem grows strong against the odds, much like Maya in The Class Election, who finds the courage to run against a popular classmate. To switch to informational reading, try Two Paths to the Moon. Students who want more poetry can look ahead to Recess, a Grade 7 poem about growing up and leaving childhood behind.