I have the first version of Tic-Tac-Toe Haiku for Kids (more about that project) ready to go; there will eventually be 5 little games like this, each emphasizing different aspects of haiku form and content. This one is about punctuation, and I started with this one first because I knew it was going to require more haiku from me than some of the other units — I want my main source to be CC-licensed poems from the Living Haiku Anthology, but most contemporary English haiku use minimal or no punctuation beyond em dashes and ellipses, whereas with kids I wanted to expose them to a whole range of creative punctuation for making the breaks and pauses in haiku poetry. So, you'll see some haiku for kids by me in there featuring more conventional punctuation, including both original haiku and also my adaptations for kids of some haiku by Issa. 

In my haiku for kids and also the Issa adaptations, I'm using the 5-7-5 structure — which, again, is something you do not see so often in contemporary literary haiku. But for kids, I think it's important for them to learn about the 5-7-5 approach to haiku. For at least for some kids, that can be a big help in writing their own haiku, and it's almost certainly what they have been taught in school if they've already learned about haiku. They will also be exposed to a wide variety of lengths in the poetry I'm using from the Living Haiku Anthology, which is good. The idea is 5-7-5 at most, always with the option to go shorter.

The nice people in my writing group are going to help me test this out tomorrow, and I am curious to see how it will go. I suspect that there will not really be winners in the game but instead a lot of tied scores. And that's a good thing! None of the haiku games I've made are really about winning or losing; instead, the goal is just to play the game, learning and enjoying. The way the tic-tac-toe game is scored, all the players will get points, and I suspect there will be a lot of tied scores; I'll find out tomorrow!

So, this is the first Tic-Tac-Toe game slidedeck with the instructional part of the game plus the poems to play with (there are enough poems to play two rounds), and it contains links to the prepared Tic-Tac-Toe sheets. Fingers crossed for tomorrow!