Do You Haiku?
By Sharon Daly
Each year at this time, fourth-grade students at the elementary school where I work submit haiku poems for a regional contest. Haiku is a deceptively simple poetic form, consisting of only 17 syllables: 5 syllables in the first and third lines and seven in the second. This annual contest is open to all fourth graders, (through an organization of school districts that support programs for advanced learners), with the underlying belief that students who perform above grade level in English/Language Arts have a unique ability to synthesize complex concepts, emotions, and awareness into a seventeen syllable format. The fourth-graders who have had winning entries over the past two decades from my school certainly uphold that notion. A haiku written by one of my students that was selected as a winner in last year’s contest exemplifies this:
Lima, Peru
I don’t speak Spanish
Yet we played on the same beach
Hot sun shining down
By Malina S.
As I have been reading the haiku poems being submitted this year, and feeling the excitement of the students as they created them, I began to think about how haiku and other forms of poetic writing can straddle all subjects rather than being solely relegated to English/Language Arts. So imagine my surprise when on a willy-nilly dive down the internet rabbit hole, I stumbled on resources that feature haiku related to all kinds of history and science topics, including climate change and the periodic table of elements!
Famed oceanographer and climate change scientist Gregory C. Johnson writes haiku about climate change and reduced a 2000 page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change into seventeen illustrated haiku poems. How brilliant is that?
I also learned that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) published an online Periodic Table in 2017 that lets you hover a mouse over every element (119 of them!) and read a haiku written in its honor.
Another source that I encountered in my search was a book written by students ages 11–18 at the Camden School for Girls in London, England entitled:
The students published this book of science haiku to help fund science resources for their school. Although not strictly poems that were written in haiku form, another book entitled: The Poetry of Science: The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science for KIDS includes 248 poems that spark interest in a multitude of science topics written by 78 award-winning and popular poets.
More internet digging unearthed the discovery that synthesizing big ideas into haiku has a place in a history course too. Historian H.W. Brands, a professor at the University of Texas Austin tweets history haiku via Twitter, https://news.utexas.edu/2014/03/25/tweeting-history-one-haiku-at-a-time/, synthesizing the history of the world “one haiku at a time.”
These wonderful examples help feed my burgeoning belief that poetry can be a catalyst for students to express a deep understanding of concepts and topics in every discipline and grade level and that students who are adept at the kind of wordplay, imagery, and facility with language show abilities that go beyond those of their grade-level peers.
I am currently reading a book entitled ‘Poems are Teachers,’ by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater. She has a website and a blog devoted to educators and student poetry. Amy’s book is a treasure trove of ideas for using poetry to foster strong writing in all genres. She believes that “poetry is our wisest writing teacher.” In the preface of the book, she states “The strong writing students admire in poems translates directly to the strong writing they admire in other genres.”
My TIWI journey into poetry feels like it is sprouting wings
