Teachers creating a mini-lesson on poetry, simile, or imagery can utilize E.B.White’s “Chairs in Snow.” While spring may be an easy choice for writing poetry about nature, using winter imagery may prove more challenging. Yet, White’s poem contains a simile that draws in winter, summer, and fall, and compares them to youth. How many of us have chairs outside now (in February) that are covered in snow? What else is left behind from summer? Perhaps a bird house, a garden path, a covered pool, all waiting for warmer days. Students could look in their own yards, out the classroom window, or in their neighborhoods for something that is waiting, or that has been left behind and incorporate it into a poem. Inspiration abounds, even in winter.
