Paw Learning Mazes

By Karen Petit

Paw Learning Mazes has maze poems, sonnets, and narrative poems with a lot of action and interaction between people and animals. Action also happens between animals and animals, as this stanza from the poem “Paws Learning in a Jungle” shows:

“The mother was the first monkey to smell and to see the tiger that had been hiding in a different tree, but now was moving toward the mother’s only child that was too scared to run off into a jungle wild.”

Different kinds of learning happen in Paw Learning Mazes, including writing, reading, financial literacy, STEM, visual, aural, historic, and multi-modal. People and animals can also learn within their dreams and from each other, as illustrated in “A Cat Learning How to Fly,” “Hissing for Free Space,” and “A Cat and a Dog Competing to Write Faster.” Team learning is seen in multiple poems, such as in “Team Learning for Ants.”

Interaction between animals and people happens in “Learning with Birds in Roger Williams Park,” “A Dog Helping Her Owner to Read Fast,” “Pigeons Flying to Financial Literacy,” “Cats Grading Essays,” “A STEM Dream about an Egret,” and many other poems in this book. Paw Learning Mazes has thirty-four mazes, which are parts of eight maze poems. These mazes and eighteen pictures add to the multi-modal elements of this book’s poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664278929

Karen Petit

Dr. Karen Petit (www.drkarenpetit.com) has written four books of poetry and four novels. She received an award from the Academy of American Poets and has a Doctorate in English from the University of Rhode Island. For over fourteen years, Petit has been the Writing Center Coordinator and an adjunct faculty member at the Community College of Rhode Island. For more than three decades, this author has been teaching courses at community colleges, colleges, and universities.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Mazes of Learning Maze

Mazes of Learning

Squirrels Shivering in the Snow

Dogs Helping with the Writing Process Mazes

Dogs Helping with the Writing Process

A Cat Learning How to Fly

Learning with Birds in Roger Williams Park

A Cat and A Dog Competing to Write Faster

Cats Grading Essays Mazes

Cats Grading Essays

Praying for Animals

Birds Praying for People

Dancing Political Fingers and Paws Mazes

Dancing Political Fingers and Paws

Paws Learning in a Jungle

Ethos, Logos, and Pathos Maze

Ethos, Logos, and Pathos

Pigeons Flying to Financial Literacy

A Dog Helping His Owner to Read Fast

A STEM Dream about an Egret Mazes

A STEM Dream about an Egret

Team Learning for Ants

Aliens Helping with Climate Change

Spying on the Paws of Life Mazes

Spying on the Paws of Life

Hissing for Free Space Mazes

Hissing for Free Space

Endnotes

About The Author

Preface

Paw Learning Mazes, Dr. Karen Petit’s fourth book of poetry, has a lot of content about the learning processes of people and animals. The learning process can include analysis, reading, writing, speaking, listening, typing, seeing, smelling, tasting, using one’s hands to create things, practicing actions multiple times, and learning in a favorite environment with preferred methods. Learning can happen with HCI (human-computer interaction), VARK (visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic), STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), dreams, multi-modal methods, and team work.

We can learn in classrooms, with family members, and with community members, such as friends, neighbors, doctors, nurses, vets, police officers, and fire fighters. Parents often teach their children. Even non-human parents will teach their children to do things. One of the poems in Paw Learning Mazes, Paws Learning in a Jungle, has a monkey who teaches her child how to climb in a tree and how to avoid a hungry tiger. Other poems in this book also have non-human family members teaching children how to do things, such as the poem Learning with Birds in Roger Williams Park.

Animals sometimes teach people, and people sometimes teach animals. One of the poems in Paw Learning Mazes, Dogs Helping to Write has a few dogs in an animal rescue center helping a writer to write a better donation letter by using some prewriting, writing, revision, and editing methods in a dream. People also teach animals to learn in different ways. The poem Praying for Animals shows people teaching animals with beeping horns, food distribution, and sweetness. The poem Pigeons Flying to Financial Literacy shows how people can teach pigeons to fly to different places and parts of financial literacy.

The learning process is also seen in some of the poems in Petit’s first three books of poetry: Holidays Amaze, Amazing Holiday Paws, and Paw Dream Mazes. Even after college graduation, people will still be learning. Holidays Amaze, Petit’s first book of poetry, has a poem The Joys of Learning on Graduation Day. Here is the last stanza:

"The upward blinks of educated eyes

showed the brightness of education’s rise

while applying diverse past learning journeys

into future stage crossings of brilliant ease."¹

Petit’s second book of poetry, Amazing Holiday Paws, also has learning happening in some poems. A fast ferret is described as learning a lot in a maze in the first poem of this book: Ferrets Ferreting New Year’s Resolutions (January 1). Another poem in this book, Tools for Clocks on Father’s Day (Third Sunday of June), has a father who shows his kids how to fix clocks.

Petit’s third book of poetry, Paw Dream Mazes, has a poem about mice learning how to move through a maze while dreaming (A Hungry Mouse in a Dream Maze Mazes). In another poem in Paw Dream Mazes, Cat Grammar Mazes, the owner of two cats dreams about her cats making grammar errors; the maze versions have both correct and incorrect grammar sections, so readers can have fun while figuring out which pathways in the mazes are grammatically correct, as well as finding out what grammar problems they might have in their own writing. The poem Cats Helping with the Right Writing Process, which is also in Paw Dream Mazes, has two cats helping a human dreamer to overcome writer’s block and plagiarism problems.

Humans and non-humans all have brains. Even bees and ants have minds and often interact with each other as a team to do their tasks of finding food, building their homes, protecting each other, etc. The poem Team Learning for Ants in Paw Learning Mazes shows ants learning with each other. The learning process is most effective when it includes using multimodal elements, such as using two or more of the following components: writing, reading, listening, seeing, smelling, tasting, practicing different things, and moving one’s hands, paws, feet, and/or wings. Paw Learning Mazes, like Petit’s other three books of poetry, has many multimodal elements. These are defined in the Preface of Petit’s first book of poetry, Holidays Amaze: Images are often ‘seen’ in the metaphors, similes, symbolic elements, format, sentence structures, use of icons, and the structure of a poem. Aural elements are hearable through the rhythms, rhymes, alliteration, and other sound elements.² In Petit’s four books of poetry, the maze poems and pictures add to the visual content. These visual elements are all in some way connected to the content of the poems.

Animal intelligence has been explored by many researchers, including by David Robson. In his article