love is a roller coaster...

Gratisography.com. Roller coaster. CC 0. 

When I teach poetry, I like to introduce my students to the idea of a conceit by asking them to each contribute an end to the sentence "love is a roller coaster because..." They usually toss my stuffed turtle (won at Kings Dominion) around the room, taking turns. By the time everyone has added their own end to the sentence, the metaphor has become a conceit.

I experimented here by creating a visual of the metaphor "love is a roller coaster," and then adding the text. Instead of having students come up with a quick, on-the-spot sentence completion, it might be fun to have them each create their own visual representation of the metaphor and add their text; the images could all be compiled into a class Google PowerPoint. Then, the conceit can be more interactive and visual for the students.

Quick activities like this one that might only take students 5-10 minutes to complete in pairs can have some meaningful add-ins, like requiring that students cite their images into a shared Bibliography as a reminder of MLA formatting.

To create this picture, I found a found a copyright free image of a roller coaster then used PicMonkey to make it black and white, superimpose a transparent red heart, and add the text.