Writing poetry is a lot of fun, as long as the teacher gets the preparation figured out. Before writing, students need to read many examples, and it is important that these examples are relatively comprehensible. Most of the haiku I find online uses vocabulary that my students don’t know, so I simply it, write my own, and reuse students’ work from past years.
I want my students to write haiku — and then submit their poems to the annual Itoen Haiku Contest — so I also need to practice counting syllables with them. Sometimes students write a line and it has too few or too many syllables. To fix it, they can modify verb tenses or swap out words for others with similar meanings, both of which are a good way to practice restating or rephrasing things.
- Syllable Bingo. A board game for practicing syllable counting.
- Syllable Examples. Some words for practicing syllable counting.
- Haiku Writing 1, Haiku Writing 2, Haiku Writing 3.
- Syllable Splitting 1, Syllable Splitting 2, Syllable Splitting 3.
- Literature Done in English. The first chapter of this book is on poetry, including several pages on haiku. If you want to spend several weeks on the subject, take a look.
ESL Tokyo 