using just seventeen syllables to create a riddle for your reader
Piñon Poetry Festival presenter, Heather Clark, inspired this on-line WritingFix lesson.
The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book If Not for the Cat by Jack Prelutsky. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.
Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library.
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources :
Step one (sharing the published model): The best book to showcase when teaching the haiku format? Jack Prelutsky's awesome and beautifully illustrated If Not for the Cat. Once students understand the form and the structure, they can write haikus about anything--math, science, history, literature--celebrating our amazing language as they go! First read the book without showing the pictures. Let students guess what animal Prelutsky's seventeen syllables are capturing. This is an amazingly fun book to share out loud in this manner. Students will appreciate the haikus as riddles. On your second read, show the pictures, but first explain that each poem is only seventeen syllables; after each page, have students repeat the haikus and count out the syllables on their fingers.
Suggests Heather, "On your third read of If Not for the Cat, don't show the illustrations or the poems, and require your students listen for really great words and attempt to write them down. You will need to assure them that spelling Prelutsky's best words is not an issue at this point of the activity. Have students share their favorite words from the book, and you can write them on the board. Demonstrate good 'pre-writing spelling practice' by labeling words whose spelling you're not sure about with an sp, so the students don't see you come to a dead stop because of one possible misspelling. In small groups, have students attempt to discover how many syllables every word written on the board has. Talk about disagreements; assure them that syllabication can be hard."
Heather's students then play her "Syllable Game," which is briefly describedbelow. This is an excellent way to teach syllables in words in a way that is fun and group-supported.
Heather's Syllable Game, in brief:
One student volunteer goes into the hall.
The class decides on one word from the book we've listed on the board, and we quickly double-check the dictionary for syllable-division (and spelling!).
The class is quickly divided into the same amount of groups as syllables in the word. Each group begins chanting its assigned syllable over and over.
The words from the board get hidden. The student in the hall re-enters. The class continues chanting.
The student walks from group to group, attempting to figure out what word has been broken into the pieces he/she is hearing.
"After the syllable game," says Heather, "have your whole class create a list of awesome adjectives that they might use if they were describing animals that pop into their heads. Create and post this list where everyone can see it. Encourage the best words by asking for synonyms for student-suggested words that could be more interesting." Have students each write (at least) one animal "riddle haiku" that uses a marvelous adjective somewhere inside it. Students can certainly illustrate their poems, but make sure they test them out as "riddles" on their peers by reading their haikus aloud and seeing if a friend can guess their animal based only on the seventeen syllables.
Post some of your students' animal haikus. Once your class understands a haiku as a format or structure, come back to the haiku every week or so. At the end of a lesson on fractions, have students write a haiku about a fraction. At the end of a lesson on amoebas, have students write an amoeba haiku. At the end of a lesson on spontaneous combustion...well, you get the idea.
Haikus can become a marvelous way to reflect on learning in any curriculum area. As author Barry Lane suggests, "Haiku everything!"
Step two (introducing models of writing): As you continue to require students to compose haikus after learning concepts, share with them haikus from other student writers.
As your students become more efficient with the format, remind them that a true haiku makes a connection back to the natural world. The example haikus found on the student instruction page celebrate this notion.
Step three (sharing more literature with haikus): Here are two more book titles that celebrate the haiku:
Introduced to us at the 2006 NCTE conference, this is another marvelous book of animal haikus by another of our favorite authors and poets.
If you know of other haiku books that teachers should know about, e-mail the title and authors to us at Webmaster@writingfix.com.
Click on the book covers to view these two books at Amazon.
the haiku year
by Michael Stipe, Douglas A. Martin, Grant Lee Phillips, et al.
Introduced to us by Northern Nevada Writing Project Consultant Sparrow Malvino, this haiku collection showcases unique haikus sent by postcard between prolific friends for a year. Some of the haikus are adult-oriented, so a teacher would need to hand-select which ones can be shared with students.
Step four (publishing for the portfolio): If your students keep a journal, a writer's notebook, or a learning log, you can ask them store their haikus throughout the school year in those places. At the year's end, ask them to flip back through their pages and find their five or ten best haikus from the year. These can be published together on a page in their student portfolios as "snapshots of what I've learned about this year."
Interested in publishing student work on-line? We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers. This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.
Learn more about poet Jack Prelutsky by clicking here.
the haiku year
