A great activity for any Ruhi book -- ask participants to write poems about the topic you are studying using the Cinqain.  This style of poetry can take any theme, even pull out words and phrases from the quotations and make very beautiful poems.  
 

About Cinquains

Perhaps as early as in 1909, the shy and sensitive Adelaide Crapsy had read A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, William N. Porter's translations of the Hyakunin Isshu anthology and From the Eastern Sea by Yone Nogushis. In Adelaide's notebook she lists eleven tanka and eight haiku she had translated from Antholgie de la littérature japonaise des origines au XX siécle from Marcel Revon. So influenced, she developed her own poetic system which she then called cinquain.

These short, unrhymed poems consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines were related to but not copied from Japanese literary styles. Though she devised this form in 1909 - 1910, most of the fifteen poems she saved were written between 1911 and 1914. An early death at 37 from tuberculosis prevented her from exploring the genre further.

Published posthumously, in 1915, with her other works as The Complete Poems, cinquains came to be well-known only through the efforts of Carl Sandburg in his anthology, Cornhuskers, 1918 and Louis Utermeyer's Modern American Poetry, 1919.

Line 1:	a one-word line, a noun, that gives the poem its title
Line 2:	two adjectives that describes what the poem is about
Line 3:	three action -ing verbs that describe something the subject of the poem does
Line 4:	a phrase that indicates a feeling related to the subject of the poem
Line 5:	a one-word line, noun, that sums about the poem is about, essentially renaming it

Examples of Cinquains

Youth

Beautiful, inquisitive

Exploring, Developing, Growing

Movers of the world

Hope

(C. Maghzi)

 

Nas

Kind, Strong

Loving, Providing, Caring

A friend to all

Helper

(C. Maghzi)

 

Saplings

Courageous, Vital

Reviving, Ennobling, Rehabilitating

Developing the gifts innate

Heroes

(S. Ali)

 

Youth

Intense, Vulnerable

Exploring, Collaging, Melanging

Trying on new identities

Metamorphosis

(D. Bryant & L. Campbell)

 

Youth

Fearless, Noble

Striving, Teaching, Learning

Spearhead of any enterprise

Lions

(V. Ali)

 

Children

Happy, Joyous

Singing, Laughing, Praying

Awaiting chances to serve

Gladiators

(B. Azad)

 

Group

Mischievous, Loud

Yelling, Laughing, Searching

Love watching them grow

Junior Youth

(R. Breton)