Another follow-up to the children's book posts this week (Hi, Koo! and My First Book of Haiku Poems) — today I have for you a children's workbook for haiku and related exercises by Japanese artist Lily Okamoto: Haiku Adventure: A Mindful Journey Through Nature, available from Amazon. This is a very nicely done book with lots of space in the book where children can take notes, write poetry, and also color and draw. Some of the pages are meant to be cut out, and there are big clear lines and plenty of space to safely clip those pages from the book.
There are six different "adventures" in the book (I'm not quite sure what the "15 moments" on the cover refers to...?), with a handy checklist in the front so that children can note their progress through the six adventures (and a cute little "certificate of completion" in the back). The adventures are:
- Nature Scavenger Hunt: a very hands-on outdoors activity with pages to record notes, and good tips on mindfulness in nature and how to find inspiration.
- Haiku Matching Game: people reading this blog know I like card games! This is a matching game with haiku poems and illustrations — I like the way the card pairs are designed (they could also be used to play a form of "Concentration," for example), but I think it might have been more fun to make the art on the cards into coloring pages (see next adventure), getting the readers more involved with the art by coloring.
- Add Color: since this third adventure is adding color, it would maybe be nice to have this come before the matching game, and then readers could keep on coloring!
- Haiku Tales: a very nice way to look at a 3-line haiku form as a simple "story" grounded in nature; here's what Okamoto means by a "haiku tale" — the first line is the setting and/or mood, and then the next two lines are characters doing things in that setting:
Ocean waves crash
Seagulls fly in the blue sky
Children build sandcastles - Haiku Meditation: this is a lovely activity with haiku poems as meditation prompts for the younger readers; very nicely done!
- Nature Walk: this is a lot like the Nature Scavenger Hunt, and I really like the way that the whole book is framed, beginning and ending with nature; the prompts for this final adventure emphasize the five senses, which is great for haiku (and for life in general!).
The book has bits of information about the haiku poets Basho, Buson, and Chiyo-Ni, and it was wonderful to see Chiyo-Ni included (here's her Wikipedia article: Kaga no Chiyo). The book does not get hung up on formal definitions and rules about haiku: instead, it is all about activities and mindfulness, with lots for young readers to do. They read haiku poetry along the way, learning about haiku by reading the poems integrated into the activities.
If I were doing this activity book together with a young person, I would want to include some of my favorite haiku poets and poems, and the open, friendly framework of the book would make that easy to do. There is room for all kinds of things to happen based on where a teacher or parent's or child's interests might go.
My one quibble with the book is the intrusion of "learning objective" boxes for each of the activities. The text in these boxes is written in teacher-ese language that breaks the otherwise very nice flow of the author writing in clear, simple, compelling language for very young readers. I'm not sure that a book like this needs formal learning objectives, but if it does (?), then it would be easy to put that material at the back of the book where teachers and parents can find it, rather than having it disrupt the nice conversation directly involving the book's young readers.
Someday I would like to be able to create learning materials for very young readers like this, and I learned a lot from seeing Lily Okamoto's approach. I hope I can apply some of what I have learned in my own work going forward!