Writing Haiku

This week we looked at a new structure.  However, this structure uses words as materials and forms them into a structure known as Haiku. 

To understand Haiku, Mrs. March shared some of her favorite Haiku poems.  First she read Least Things.  The poems were written by Jane Yolen and the photographs were taken by her son.  Like traditional forms of Haiku they were about nature.  Some were like riddles and we had to figure out what she was writing about. 

The following is what Jane Yolen had to say about writing Haiku's and her book Least Things

 LEAST THINGS began when I read the quote, “Nature excels in her least things.” I told my photographer son Jason and he began taking photos of nature’s smallest things–jingle shells, tiny crabs, butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, etc. Slowly he gathered his photographs but I had an enormous amount of trouble writing the poems. The first two I tried were for the shells and the crab, and they were dreadful–and twice as long as the objects he had photographed! And then one day I sat up in bed and said, “Of course, haiku!” Why it took me so long to realize that haiku were the perfect form for the book, I don’t know. But once I had that figured out, I could sit down and finally really focus on the book.

After listening and discussing some the poems we hit out notebooks and looked at some of our lists from observing a nest.  Using nest as a topic we started with constructing Haikus.  We began with some good words and building words around them and counting syllables.  At the end of the session we agreed we would all play around with haiku and try to write as many as we could until next Tuesday.  We plan on making a book of our poems during April - National Poetry month.