Mad Libs For Kids
I thought I’d share a little story my family wrote together.
The Farmer by The Summers
Farmers work very hard planting wheat and tennis rackets. They begin by plowing their puppy and if they don’t have a tractor, they use high heels. Then they plant squishy seeds, and by the next Fall, they have many acres of earrings. Tomatoes are harder to raise. They grown on fat bushes and the farmer sprays them with lemonade to keep the bugs off. The easiest thing to grow are green pies, but the farmer must be very careful to make sure worms don’t get into his house. Farmers also raise onions, cabbages, lettuce and Michiganians. But no matter what they grow, farmers really lead a shrill life.
No, no we’re not actually a remedial family in bad need of an editor, we’ve brought out the Mad Libs books for our kids. After dinner a couple months ago we pulled out a book I’d bought and promptly forgot about and did a couple.
The kids are dropped into hysterical fits of laughter at these nonsense stories they create. This sentence reduced them to tears, “A country located almost directly across from the United Penguins of America….:” As an adult I am mildly amused by these sentences but the hysterics of the kids is the thing I mostly enjoy.
I also love the vocabulary lesson these books give my kids. It’s fun to hear them come up with different parts of speech, expanding from simple words to more complicated ones. “Shrill” in the story above came from my six year old, not that I ever call anyone shrill, I just don’t know where he learned that.
These are good books for traveling, for boring restaurant dinners and family game nights. Younger kids (three and four) will probably have trouble coming up with adverbs, but pretty often a “funny noise” or “number” is needed and that’s simple enough to give them a turn. Or you can buy the Junior version of the books geared to the 4-8 year old set. All the books are around $3.99 a piece.
Even better, try it out online with your kids before you buy. They even give a handy grammar review outlining exactly what an adverb is. For the kids….right?
