A few weeks back, I had my 3rd grader, Caden, sitting at the table doing a worksheet on the parts of speech, such as: verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns, etc. He took a good half hour doing it, and when he was done, I gave him a quick oral quiz…just to be sure he knew his stuff. And, no. He didn’t. He had all the answers right on his paper, but he retained the information JUST long enough to finish it. The second he was done, it was gone. I was like, “Okay, dude. Are you serious?? You just BARELY finished your worksheet and now you don’t remember any of it??”Hello, intervention.
I had just finished reading a massive book on the Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling, and something I read in there came flooding back to my mind. (By the way, I love lots of stuff about that method, and plan to apply some (I don’t love everything) of the ideas next year. I’ll explain later.) Anyway, I remembered how the best way to retain information is to have developed an interest in that topic…or make the topic exciting. So, hmmm….how could I get the kids to WANT to know their grammar…nothing came to me. Then, during a trip to Barnes and Noble, it came…
…drum roll, please…
MAD LIBS!!
Remember Mad Libs?? They are fun little paragraphs with parts of the sentences missing…you fill in the blanks with whatever is requested…maybe, an adverb, plural noun, exclamation, etc. They are hilarious to read, when you’re done.
So, I bought a couple books, gathered the kids on the couch and started filling in the blanks.
“Caden, give me a plural noun.”
“Shane, give me an adverb.”
“Caden, give me a verb in past tense”
and, so on. The best part is when you read it back, the kids LOVE it! We have had sooo many belly-laughs from doing Mad Libs. Of course, most of their chosen nouns are words like, “poop”, “butts,” and “uvula.” That’s right, my kids love to say “uvula,” don’t ask me why. And, their adjectives are “stinky,” “crusty,” and “kooka-munga.” But, really…I don’t care. As long as they’re learning, “poop” is fine.
At first, I had to remind them WHAT each of the speech parts were. But, after doing Mad Libs three times, they’ve got it down and are begging to do it again every day!
If you’ve got some spare time on your hands, it would be super easy to make up your own Mad Libs. Just type up a paragraph on Word, then go back and delete random words. Replace the word with the grammar title that needs to be there (adverb, plural noun, verb, etc.) and underline it. All done! You can either scribble the new words above the underlined part, or make a list of the new words underneath the paragraph.
For example,
“House Rules”
NOUN-PERSON and NOUN-PERSON make the rules of the NOUN. Some of them are ADJECTIVE, some of them ADJECTIVE. If I got to be the parent, I would really change things up. First, there would be no such thing as NOUN time. I could VERB as long as I wanted. Every night, my NOUN-PERSON would ADVERB read me NUMBER books and then serve me a big bowl of NOUN. I would VERB NOUN and watch tv, until I VERB-PAST asleep. In the morning, there would be a ADJECTIVE breakfast waiting for me. I would skip school and VERB-PAST with all my friends. My parents would never ask me to do PLURAL NOUN again. They would buy me whatever I wanted and take me to NOUN-PLACE every day. I could ADVERB live like that and my life would be ADJECTIVE. But, I can only dream.
Anyway, that’s all. It worked for us!
GREAT tip! We love Mad Libs! What a fun way to “trick” our kids into knowing their parts of speech.
I, too, love many of the ideas of Charlotte Mason. My favorite is learning through interesting topics. We are learning SO MUCH right now by studying birds. It’s not just about the birds, but that’s fun too.
I’ve loved Mad Libs since I was a kid. I just read another good idea in a magazine related to Mad Libs. On each kid’s birthday, this mom would write the “story” of the last year of the kids life with everything important that happened. Then, she’d go through and make it into an Mad Lib. I thought it was a cute tradition!
Great idea!