Teachers always seem to have better answers. One way to help students understand how symbols work is to ask them to think about private symbols. A particular bus stop may be a symbol for fear because it was the spot where a strange man once accosted them. They might have saved a movie stub from the night of their first kiss. The memento is a symbol for the experience.
Car keys symbolize growing independence.
Piercing a belly button may be a symbol of rebellion against parental control. Literary symbols work in much the same way They can be traditional, as in Alice Walker's use of a heart to symbolize love, or they can be intrinsic to the work, revealing themselves only gradually through repetition. Unlike other figures of speech such as a simile or metaphor, a symbol is often difficult to talk about. Much is left up to interpretation, particularly as a symbol may well affect one reader quite differently from the way it affects another. Many students mistakenly believe that symbols are planted in a poem like carrots, and that their job as careful readers is to pull them out for counting and identification.