Celebrate: Five Star Things About the Week

Welcome to Saturday. It’s time to celebrate the week at Ruth Ayres Writes.

ONE
The book fair. It supports our library and bringing an author to Silver Star. We had several events this week including “Donuts with Dads.”

TWO
Patience. With all the rapid fire technology changes in our district being patient and letting go has been a focus this week. I now am the “go to” person for technology issues in the building AND I am being trained on the job. Sometime I have to stop and breathe.

THREE
Discovery. Yesterday I read a book about a Navajo family and the Codetalkers. I discovered that one of my students is part Navajo. So I was able to share some of my books with her from when I spent time on the Navajo Resevation in 1971.

FOUR
Volunteers. In order to have a successful book fair, volunteers are needed. There have been lots of great volunteers this week.

FIVE
This:

What are you celebrating?

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Poetry Friday: First Friday

It’s Saturday but I wanted to share a student’s work for “First Friday.” A fourth grade teacher teaches haiku every autumn. Now in the larger haiku community, it’s not encourage to teach the standard 5-7-5.

I am conflicted about whether to introduce haiku in this manner. It’s further complicated by the fact that most children’s poetry collections with haiku are published in this form.

There’s something however that kids get when sharing a specific form. Perhaps to learn haiku as 5-7-5 and then break the rules later is appropriate at elementary. Perhaps, too, as written below, that if a student uses a syllable or two more or less, that’s okay. To me, capturing a moment, an observation in nature is the most important thing. The day Christiana’s haiku was shared with me, reflected how the morning had unfolded.

Here’s Christiana’s haiku:

bright orange pumkin patch
tender wind pale morning sun
mist in the thin wind

What are your thoughts about teaching haiku?

Poetry Friday is with Diane at Random Noodlingthis week.

Happy Friday.
Happy Poetry.