In Writers Workshop the children have been learning about the poetry forms of cinquain and haiku. Using their collages for idea inspiration, each child chose a well loved topic for each poem such as a pet, a special memory or even hockey! The class learned that the name of the five line cinquain poem is derived by the French word for five "cinq". Haiku is a traditional Japanese form of poetry that follows a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. Dogku by Andrew Clements is our touchstone and mentor text for the class haiku project. Clements uses haiku to tell the story of how a homeless dog finds a family to love. As Clements says, Dog+ Haiku= Dogku!
A focus area during this poem writing has been specific word choice and variety to make the poems more vivid and interesting to read. Instead of words like "go" the children are choosing more specific language such as like "skip", "trudged" or "explore" !
