A simile is a figure of speech. Specifically it makes a comparison between two different items in order to highlight some similarity between the two items. The last piece of a simile is that the comparison must use the words "like" or "as" to make the comparison. For example:
My sixth grade class is full of energy. They are like the atoms in a gas -- always bouncing off the walls.
In The Witch of Blackbird Pond there is a great simile in chapter one that is used to describe Kit as she sets foot in America for the first time.
Her spirits bobbed like the whitecaps in the harbor as the boat pulled away from the black hull of the Dolphin.
A page later, Kit gets back into the longboat with a few other passengers. One is a little girl with a toy. After a few minutes of rowing, the little girl realizes that she dropped her toy in the water. The simile used to describe the floating toy is as follows.
The toy was drifting farther and farther from the boat, like a useless twig in the current.
One last simile. This one is from chapter two.
It was almost too much to bear when she heard a splash directly below her and saw that Nat and two of the other young men had taken advantage of a wait for the rowboat and were thrashing about like porpoises in the river.
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