Young Writers Society

Haiku can be fun,
But it's not my best talent.
How do I teach it?


I'm involved with an arts council which often has crafts for kids on Saturdays. This Saturday, we're having kids make cards with "Holiday Haiku." Guess who's going to be mostly in charge of teaching the haiku? Me.

Of course I know the basic formula for haiku: three un-rhymed lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. But I'm not sure how to teach that, especially the whole syllable thing. How do you teach the concept of syllables to kids?

Does anyone have any tips?

Giving examples will help and talking them through briefly what a syllable is. It should be pretty straight forward but then, I suppose that depends on the age of the children.

Give them some words (or their names) and clap on each syllable. That's how I learned (and, admittedly, I do still have to count syllables on my fingers sometimes).

Yeah, having kids clap the syllables usually does it...I think I was in second grade or so when I learned about syllables.

A haiku doesn't always have to be 5-7-5...I've been taught that haiku is more of a style of short poem than a particular structure, but usually you just teach it to children the one way.

You might give them an opening line so they have something to build off of...something like "During Christmas I..."

Good luck!
-Colleen

Thanks for your suggestions, guys! Those are good ideas!

Hehe, Meep, my mom's giving me a hard time, 'cause she said the same thing, and I doubted... Maybe that's not such a bad idea.

The idea of giving them a starting line might be a good idea, too. Especially for younger kids. I don't know what ages the kids will be, because the crafts are open to anyone who wants to do them. So we could potentially have two- or three-year-olds along with thirty- or sixty-year-olds.

I'm actually getting ready to go now. Thanks again for your help!

Generally clapping out the syllables of the words gives children the capability of figuring up how many syllables are in each word they use, then it just takes simple addition to figure out 5,7,5. I only remember this because when i was in school thats how they taught us how to learn easy syllables, but make sure to start with the basics like "cat","bat", and so on gradually working your way up to harder words.