First, some haiku, maybe the first I've ever written-
Mourning doves cooing
High in the sycamore trees
Two cats slink away
I read an interesting book about how to write haiku and other short poems. It was written for students and told the history of several types of short poems and had suggested assignments for a writer's notebook/journal. We are talking about Japan because we will see an exhibit of Japanese art next week. We talked about haiku and I read four poems to the kids. Melanie was the only one who had any prior knowledge of haiku. The kids illustrated one poem that they liked. The illustrations turned out pretty good. Another day we went outside to take a nature walk and notice possible subjects for poems. We couldn't walk far because of the fence around our patio and the kids were talking so much and being silly, so I asked them to be quiet and listen for one minute. It was amazing how much we could hear when they shut up. Then we went inside and wrote lists of things we saw and heard.
Another day I showed them a website on Japan that I had found. We looked at a section on Japanese houses and did a little interactive 'game' that helped them understand some of the differences in Japanese houses. We clicked on some Japanese schools and found one that was on an island. In the description of the island there was a photo of a whirlpool that was one of the largest in the world and was between the small island and the bigger island near it. Here is the neat thing that happened later that day-a reason that I don't agree with scripted teaching-one group was listening to The Watsons Go to Birmingham and came to the part about the whirlpool. I stopped the CD and we talked about how the boy in the story misunderstood his grandmother. He thought she said 'wool pooh' instead of whirlpool. We connected that to the photo we had seen earlier of the whirlpool in Japan. Serendipity! A spontaneous learning experience that would have been missed if we had strictly followed some script.
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