May

This month I decided to incorporate Mad Libs into our word study activities. Since it is a review unit and we have been working on identifying noun, verbs, adjectives and adverbs during our daily morning work I thought this would be a fun way for students to get some more practice with this while also reviewing the last 5 units' spelling patterns.

Mad Libs Planning Sheet

I decided to make this a partner activity so I found 11 different Mad Libs and gave each partnership one of these planning sheets. They had to work together using words from the last 5 spelling units to fill out the planning sheet. Once the planning sheet was filled out and they had it approved by an adult, they were then given the Mad Libs to fill out the missing words.

To make this more enticing and to foster some creativity we turned it into a competition. Each partnership read their completed Mad Libs to the class and the class then voted on which partnership's Mad Libs was the best. We ranked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places. The whole class enjoyed this.

These students used their textbook to find words from previous units to fill in the required kinds of words.

These students used their previous word lists from their green folders to fill in the required kinds of words.

Once each partnership's planning sheet was checked by me to make sure they chose the correct kinds of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) correctly they then filled out their corresponding Mad Libs sheet.

Here this partnership is filling out their corresponding Mad Libs with the checked words from their planning sheet.

These are two examples of the completed Mad Libs that two of the partnerships worked on.

Mad Libs is something that I have done with my classes the past few years. It is a quick activity when I have a few minutes to fill. The students really enjoy it and it provides another way for me to connect/laugh with the students. When we first started Mad Libs this year the students had a difficult time coming up with the required words. They needed constant reminders of what a noun is, what a verb is, etc... so I decided to have students start identifying the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in our daily morning work. As a result of this the students have gotten much better at identifying the different parts of speech. They know that words can be more than one part of speech depending on how they are being used in a sentence. I will incorporate this practice of identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in our daily morning work starting in September next year and I will continue to incorporate Mad Libs into our word study program. The students enjoy doing them so much that several of my students have begun the process of making their own Mad Libs.

Since doing this activity I have several students who are now creating their own Mad Libs to do with the class.

Love this idea! Mad Libs are a great way to get kids comfortable with identifying and using nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It seems like this activity fit well with your review unit. I like that each group had a choice in which words to use and how they were going to gather them. - Angelina Scaringella

Sarah! MAD LIBS! We all loved them as children, and what a brilliant idea to incorporate it into word study! This is genius. I would be so grateful if you shared your templates! :) - Amy

I love Mad Libs! This brings back all the comfort and love I felt as a kiddo! What a classic and fun experience. -Maddy Hyde

Yes- I loved those as a kid and actually I think that's how I learned parts of speech. I am putting that on my TO DO list- Thank you! - Kate

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