How to Help Your Child With Figurative Language in Reading

My daughter read the sentence out loud without a single stumble: "By the end of recess, the whole class was climbing the walls." Perfect decoding, clean and fast. Then she looked up, genuinely puzzled, and asked why the kids were climbing the walls and whether they got in trouble. She had read every word right and landed in completely the wrong place, because the author never meant a literal wall. He meant restless, wound up, bursting to get out. The words said one thing and meant another, and she had followed the words.

That gap is figurative language, and it's one of the sneakiest reasons a strong reader can still miss what a book is saying. Figurative language is any time words mean something other than their plain definition: similes and metaphors that compare, idioms a culture just agrees on, personification that hands human traits to the wind or the sea, hyperbole that exaggerates on purpose. Readers meet it constantly, in chapter books, poems, song lyrics, even the news. A child who reads it literally has done the hard mechanical work of decoding and still walked away with the wrong picture. Teaching your child to hear the second meaning is one of the higher-leverage habits you can build for their comprehension.

How to help my child with figurative language

The good news is that your child already lives in figurative language. They laugh when you say you're "so hungry you could eat a horse." They know "chill out" has nothing to do with temperature. The job isn't to install a brand-new skill, it's to make visible the thing they already do without noticing, and then point it at the words on the page. The three moves below do exactly that. Pick one, use it for a couple of weeks, and watch your child stop reading every sentence at face value.

Name the two meanings out loud

The single most useful thing I did was turn figurative language into a two-step question: "What does that literally say?" and then "What does the author actually mean?" After my daughter hit "climbing the walls," I didn't correct her. I asked her to tell me what the words said on their own, and she did, kids and an actual wall. Then I asked what she thought the author was really trying to show about how the class felt. She thought for a second and said, "That they couldn't sit still." That was it. The whole skill lives in the space between those two answers.

Naming both meanings does something quiet but important: it tells your child that the literal reading isn't wrong or dumb, it's just the first layer. There's a second one on top. After a couple of weeks of the two questions, she started catching the gap herself, pausing at a phrase and going, "Wait, that's not really what it means, is it?" That pause is the payoff. It's the sound of a reader noticing that words can carry more than they say.

Sort the common types so they stop feeling random

Figurative language feels less slippery once a child has names for the handful of shapes it comes in. Similes compare two things with "like" or "as," so "as quiet as a mouse" is a simile. Metaphors make the comparison directly, calling one thing another, as in "the classroom was a zoo." Idioms are fixed expressions a culture just agrees on, like "break a leg" or "the ball's in your court," and they're the ones kids find hardest because you can't reason your way to them, you just have to know them. Personification gives human traits to things that aren't human ("the old house groaned"), and hyperbole exaggerates way past the truth on purpose ("I've asked you a thousand times").

You don't need flashcards. We started a running game in the car: I'd toss out the front half of a simile ("as busy as a...") and she'd finish it, then she'd throw one back at me. We hunted idioms in song lyrics and found a dozen in a single pop song. Once she had the categories, the phrases stopped arriving as random noise and started sounding like moves an author was choosing. That shift, from "why would it say that?" to "oh, that's a metaphor," is exactly what you're after.

Catch it in real life, not just in books

Figurative language is everywhere in how we already talk, which makes the best practice ground free and constant. You say you're "dead tired," that a chore was "a piece of cake," that someone "has a heart of gold." Each one is a tiny lesson if you pause on it. I started narrating my own figures of speech: "I just said the printer's fighting me, but printers can't fight, right? I mean it's being difficult." Five seconds, and it turns an ordinary sentence into a worked example.

This is also where figurative language leans on context clues, because the surest way to crack an unfamiliar idiom is to use the sentence around it. When a character "froze" as the door creaked, the rest of the scene tells you it's fear, not cold. Teaching your child to test a figurative phrase against its context hands them a tool they can use on any book, with no adult standing by to translate. Keep it a conversation instead of a quiz, because a child who feels caught out stops guessing, and guessing is how they learn to hear the second meaning.

Find out if figurative language is really the gap

Here's the honest catch. Coaching figurative language only helps if that's actually where your child is stuck. Sometimes a child misses a metaphor because the real bottleneck is underneath: the vocabulary in the phrase is unfamiliar, or the background knowledge an idiom assumes just isn't there yet, or they're still working so hard to decode that there's nothing left over for a second layer of meaning. The same blank look can come from three different places, and each one wants a different fix.

That's the piece a kitchen table can't fully sort out on its own. A short adaptive reading assessment adjusts its difficulty to each answer, so in about eight minutes it finds the level your child can sustain and breaks the result down by skill, calibrated to the same NWEA MAP and iReady benchmarks schools use. Instead of a vague worry that comprehension is "off," you get a specific read: solid on literal recall, shaky on the figurative and inference skills, or the reverse. If you want the longer version of how that measurement works, it's in how Test My Kid works. And because figurative language is a close cousin of vocabulary and inference, the home moves in improving reading comprehension pair naturally with everything here.

Once I could see that my daughter's issue was the second meaning, not the reading itself, the fix got small and specific. She wasn't a weak reader. She had one nameable habit to build, and a few minutes of "what does that literally say, and what does the author actually mean?" each night did more than I expected. A missed metaphor was never a verdict about her. It was just the next layer she was learning to hear.

Last reviewed: August 20, 2026.