Saturday, November 03, 2007

Unplugged Project : Haiku

This weeks Unplugged Project was haiku.

I have to say that when I first read the idea I was pretty skeptical. My kids are 2 and 4, not reading or writing yet. But I was happy to have a break from painting and after thinking about it, came up with a plan that I thought would work for us.

Day #1 Syllables
We started at the beginning with learning what a syllable is and practicing counting the syllables in a bunch of words. This was something we just did for fun while driving around in the car.

Day #2 Poetry
We read lots of poems and talked about how some poems rhyme and some don't and that some poems are long and some are short. I have a Shel Silverstein book we looked at and my 4-year old loved the silly poems. My 2-year old also enjoyed listening to the poems

Day #3 Haiku Samples
I read the samples that MomUnplugged linked to in her original mail to the kids and had my 4-year old count the syllables. Then we talked about how they were all 5-7-5 and how there are different kinds of poems that follow different rules. After that, I cut the haiku out and let the kids glue them onto sheets of paper and then "illustrate" them. This was another activity they both liked. I was going to include one of my 2-year olds works of art but I can't get it to work right now.
Day #4 Writing Haiku
Only my older child did this one. He dictated some haiku to me and I wrote it down. Of course I had to assist as his lines tended to be really long so I had to help a good bit to get it to follow the patterns. The ideas were his though.

So here are his original compositions:

Up above the world
Find the brown bear in the trees
So that they went on

A boy is eating
In a house with a big boy
Eating on a chair

I am so glad we did this project in spite of my initial hesitation. We really did have a fun time and it was nice to have a project we could do in little pieces as it worked into our schedule.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Those are wonderful! Plus, I really like how you described how you went about this project with children so young.

After I suggested it, I was a bit afraid that people (especially those with younger children) might be put off or intimidated. But children are capable of more than we give them credit for!

I do hope you can get your pictures on. I would love to see the illustrations.

I am so glad you enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing what "red" thing you can come up with for next week!

Gottfredsen said...

I hope that you do get the pictures up I would love to see them. Great job on the Haiku though.

Andree said...

I agree with the time thing: doing it during the week. (Although in my experience, time did not improve haiku!). Those are great haiku for little tiny people. I'm going to bug the English teacher for some haiku templates this week (nope, I'm not above cheating!). Now I have another week to ponder RED.

Garden State Kate said...

Great job!