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Interact, Understand, Expand
Haiku: Interact
This activity is all about playing with language.
You might want to start this activity by pressing the "Make One For Me" button and reading the resultant, probably nonsensical, haiku. Enjoy a few laughs and talk about how the structure of a 7-syllable line sandwiched between two 5-syllable lines makes it a haiku.
When you are ready to make your own haiku, select a word set.
If your child doesn't read yet, read through a few of the words in the tray and ask if there is any she would like to start with. Let her ask you what the tiles say, or if she knows her letter sounds, see if she has an idea what it might say.
Feel free to improvise. You could use a word that sounds like a similar word to the one you really want. You could leave blank spaces to fill in after you print your haiku. Look at the limited sets of words as just starters.
Haiku: Understand
"Language development evolves…toward the creation of interpretive space"
–MIT professors Richard K. Lester & Michael J. Piore
From babyhood, children collect language data. Once they can express their needs, they turn their attention to playing with language and enjoy poetry.
Poets choose words with precisely the right meaning, including words that may have multiple meanings. It is the listener's or reader's interpretation that gives the poem its meaning for any particular time it is read.
It will be important for your child to know what a haiku is. As the activity indicates, a haiku is three-line poem where the first and third lines have five syllables and the middle line has seven. Haiku is a very popular poetry form and examples can be found at Haiku-dedicated sites all over the Web.
It is no wonder that a syllable-based language like Japanese (where for example if you wanted to say the girl's name Mina backwards you would say Nami) would give us a syllable-based form of poetry. What other languages do you know? Do they have preferred ways of making poetry?
Haiku: Expand
"Heaven sent a newborn to tell it like he see it"
—Rap group Goodie Mob
Offline Activities
Language is one of the easiest ways to play with your child. Tap your child's sense of humor, an important ingredient of creativity, by making puns and jokes together. You can play this way even while driving or cooking or doing other household tasks. A preschooler, for example, may love inventing knock-knock jokes while you cook together.
Write your own haikus from your full vocabulary. Teach your child to count syllables by clapping hands or fitting words to music.
Remember: use your own creativity to generate ideas that inspire you and your child! To see an age-by-age breakdown of what your child might be ready for, check out the PBS Parents Child Development Tracker.
Online Resources
Toddlers and preschoolers can have fun finding rhyming items at Elmo's Rhyming Activity. Being able to hear word parts, such as rhymes or beginning sounds, is called "phonemic awareness" and is necessary for learning to read an alphabetic language, where letters represent sounds.
If you have a beginning reader who enjoyed the Make Me One feature, he may also like Reading Rainbow's Silly Sentence Machine.
If your child enjoys the poetry of hand-clap and jump-rope games, he just might be a physical learner. Try the activity Uneven Bars and its related Expand suggestions.
Books and References
Read nursery rhymes and play rhyming games with your baby. If you need a refresher, take a look at a book like Mother Goose: The Children's Classic Edition, illustrated by Leon Baxter and others. Or if you can't remember which piggy toe went where or ate what, explore the book Games to Play with Babies(Third Edition) by Jackie Silberg and Laura D'Argo.
Poetry and syllables naturally lead to songs and singing. The book Shake it to the One You Love the Best: Play Songs and Lullabies from Black Musical Traditions, collected and adapted by Cheryl Warrren Mattox contains the words and the music for many well- known tunes. If your family likes to play music, your child might like to play Pentatonic Scales.
If you have a toddler or preschooler who plays in the bath long after she's clean, she might enjoy listening to poetry while playing in the water. A thoughtful collection, organized by themes and beautifully illustrated can be found in Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People, edited by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell.
Rhyme and meter feature prominently in American rap music. In fact some people notice that rap uses the iambic pentameter shared by Shakespeare and other English poetry forms. For a wonderful collection of children's songs with a rap flavor, listen to Hippity Hop (1999, Music for Little People), featuring wonderful artists such as Taj Mahal, Linda Tillery, and many others.
School-aged children continue to play with rhyme. Help your child stay on top of playground culture with books like Hand Clap! "Miss Mary Mack" and 42 Other Hand Clapping Games for Kids by Sara Bernstein (ages 4 to 8) or Red Hot Peppers: The Skookum Book of Jump Rope Games, Rhymes, and Fancy Footwork by Bob Boardman (ages 4 to 8).