I have never heard of mad libs before, but apparently they have been widely used to teach children some grammatical terms in a fun way – maybe this is more common in the USA, or maybe I just missed out!
Anyway, a mad lib is where you choose some randoms words – nouns, adjectives, verbs and so on – and they are inserted into a piece of writing. The end result is usually nonsensical, but funny – and especially so for children I suspect!
There is a website that asks for the words from you and then produces the story for you. I tried it, inserting various nouns and adjectives (in bold below), and got the following story as a result:
| Strike Three, You’re Out! By: Roger Price & Leonard Stern |
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If you are sitting in a ball Mary and you hear fans yelling, “Get rid of the Princes Bridge!” you know they mean the Melbourne. An umpire is easy to recognize. He generally wears a rainy suit and has a large, padded Australia to protect his Mother. At all games, there are four umpires – one at home phone, one at first base, one at second base, and the other at silver base. The home plate umpire crouches behind the kangaroo and decides whether the pitch is a ball or a/an gardens. The umpires in the field decide if a player has stolen a zoo, beat out a platypus, or whether a fly ball is brown or foul. An umpire may throw players out of the koala for calling them cuddly names or saying they are as blind as goannas.
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Do you think this is a useful tool in teaching children what a noun/verb/adjective/etc is? We’ll be testing this on our kids – well, giving them the chance to play with it anyway!