Haiku

Haiku is an ancient yet timeless form of Japanese poetry. Some of you may be completely unfamiliar with the term whereas some of you have already composed haiku.  Most of you fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Take a few moments to write down everything you know about haiku. If you can, try to compose one right now.  You will soon email your thoughts to me. At the end of the lesson we will re-examine these thoughts and see how our understandings of haiku have changed.

In this lesson we will examine several questions. What is haiku? Where did haiku come from? What makes a haiku a haiku? How can I compose haiku?  But first of all let us answer this question - why should we learn about haiku?  Haiku will allow you to expand your creativity and express yourself in a new way. It will bring you closer to nature. It can change the way you look at nature and even the way you look at the world. For, to write haiku you must examine the world more closely, to see the little things in a new light, to see the world with "haiku eyes."  Haiku is about discovery, and you just may discover something new about yourself!  At the end of the lesson we will share our haiku by posting our poems to a Class Haiku Web Site and share our discoveries with each other. (For students with limited internet access, you may print out the entire lesson  from this graphics free printable web site .

Before learning about haiku, let's take a few moments to learn how to move around in this lesson.  If you do not know how to operate links or are truly new at moving around the World Wide Web read further. If you are already familiar with links, move on to How to Navigate this Site .

The blue underlined sentence is called a "link" or "hyperlink" because it links you to another web page, email option, or some other site the web page designer wants you to access. Links are usually blue and underlined if you have not yet been to that page and purple and underlined if you have already been to that page. This allows you to keep track of which pages you have already visited. Clicking your left mouse button on a PC (or your mouse button on a MacIntosh) anywhere on the underlined link will activate the link and bring up the new site.  Click the How to Navigate this Site link now.