Snow Mail

• Preview the illustration with students. Invite them to use evidence to explain how the illustration at the top and the illustration at the bottom are different. (Top image: A girl is dressed warmly, it’s snowing, and she’s putting snow in a box. Bottom image: It’s a sunny day, and there is a cactus and tumbleweed. A girl has opened a box. She has a letter and looks confused. The box is wet.)
• This poem has several challenging vocabulary words that you can review with students before reading. These include enchanting, aglow, intriguing, parcel, and pondering.
• Have a volunteer read aloud the Up Close box. Then provide two statements for students to compare: “Oh no, we gotta go!” and “It’s time to leave right now.” Ask students to explain the feeling the rhyme and rhythm add to the first statement. How is it different from the second statement? (The rhyme and rhythm make the first statement sound playful or exciting. The second statement is more direct and serious.)

• Read the poem aloud, or play our Author Read-Aloud to hear poet Kenn Nesbitt introduce himself and read his poem out loud to your class.
• Read the definition of alliteration beside the poem. Point out the alliteration in the third line—“The winter is windy and white.” Ask students how using alliteration affects the sound of the poem or the feeling it creates. (Accept all plausible answers. One answer might be that it makes the poem sound more musical.) Ask students to find other examples of alliteration in the poem (snow swirling down; says when her city is coated in snow; snow sounds intriguing).
• Ask volunteers to point out the rhyming words that end each line in the first two stanzas. Each volunteer can say one set of rhyming words. Then explain that poets and readers who analyze poems give letters to lines that rhyme, so this poem can be said to use the AABB rhyming pattern.
• Reread the first two lines of the poem, while snapping, tapping, or making a signal for each beat in the line. (My COUsin’s my PEN pal. We WRITE back and FORTH . . .) Have students clap the beats as you read the rest of the poem through the second stanza. Ask what they notice about the beats. (They follow the same rhythmic pattern. Explain that the syllables that you are emphasizing are called “stressed” syllables and that the pattern that stressed and unstressed syllables follow in a poem is called the rhythm.)
• Read the third stanza aloud, with a dramatic pause before finishing the last line. Ask students to explain what the poet does to change the rhythm at this point. (If the ending followed the rhyme and rhythm of the rest of the poem, “And wet” would be joined with the second-to-last line.)
• Discuss the poem together by answering the questions below.

• What does the information in the first stanza tell you about the speaker of the poem? How does this relate to the illustration? (point of view) The speaker lives in the south. The speaker is the girl at the bottom of the picture, and the girl at the top is her cousin.
• The end of the second stanza helps you predict the end of the poem. Explain how.(inference) The speaker asks for snow to be sent to her. The reader knows that the snow will melt, which is what then happens.
• This poem is a silly one, and it ends like a joke with a punchline: “And wet.” Explain the joke and the punchline in your own words. (interpreting text) The joke is that you can’t ship snow to a warm place in the south without something to keep it cold. Snow and hail packed in just a cardboard box will melt. The punchline “And wet” is the evidence that there was actually snow in the box once, but it melted.
  
• What do the rhyme and rhythm add to the meaning of the poem? How would the poem be different if it had been written without rhyme or a regular rhythm? (poetic device) Answers will vary but may include: The rhyme and rhythm give the poem a bouncy, silly energy. It sounds fun. If it had been written without rhyme or a regular rhythm, it might sound more serious.
  

Distribute or assign the Poetry Writing Activity, which will guide students to use this poem as a model to write a poem, with rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration, from the cousin’s point of view.