Haiku

This week our Tower Hamlets classes learnt about Haiku, a Japanese form of poetry. We discovered that Haiku (in English) is written in the form of 3 lines, made up of 17 syllables following a syllable structure of 5, 7, 5. We analysed some Haiku poems and found that they are full of themes of nature, seasons and ordinary facts about everyday life. We then focused on writing our own Haiku poems and were surprised how we were able to take the ordinary and simple and turn it into something poetic. Here are a few that students wrote:

It is freezing cold

I am tucked inside my bed

On a winters day

 

Going to the park

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Aleisha’s story

Over the past month students at our Tower Hamlet’s Women’s class have been discussing mental health perceptions within society. An interesting point raised was how stereotypes of mental health differed so widely from the student’s own lived reality. As a way to change perceptions students decided to write a fictional story dealing with some of the issues. They worked as a class to plot a story line and then broke off into smaller groups to write more detailed paragraphs. We are planning to publish the finished story but in the mean time here’s the opening paragraph…

Once upon a time there lived a girl called Aleisha who enjoyed going to school. She enjoyed playing with her friends Samira and Lakshmi, they were very funny and made Aleisha laugh. Aleisha told them all her secrets. She also liked playing with her dog Sandy after she finished school and came home. Aleisha was very good at art and maths and she was studying for her GCSEs. Her family were very creative. Her mum was an artist and her dad an art teacher, so you see art ran in the family….