{"id":351,"date":"2008-09-30T12:39:23","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T02:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/?p=351"},"modified":"2012-02-23T15:44:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-23T04:44:17","slug":"mad-libs-to-teach-sentence-contructions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/2008\/09\/mad-libs-to-teach-sentence-contructions\/","title":{"rendered":"Mad libs to teach sentence contructions?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever done some &#8220;mad libs&#8221;? Is this something you remember fondly from school days &#8211; at least more fondly than the usual grammar lessons?<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I hadn&#8217;t heard of mad libs until finding them mentioned in another blog, but apparently they have been widely used to teach children some grammatical terms in a fun way &#8211; maybe this is more common in the USA, or maybe I just missed out!<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, a mad lib is where you choose some randoms words &#8211; nouns, adjectives, verbs and so on &#8211; and they are inserted into a piece of writing. The end result is usually nonsensical, but funny &#8211; and especially so for children I suspect!<\/p>\n<p>I remember playing games where we each wrote a type of word, folded the piece of paper and passed it on to write another word on someone else&#8217;s piece of paper. The final result there was a funny sentence. Mad libs are similar to that game, but you don&#8217;t come up with the entire story with your words.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.itsamadlibsworld.com\" target=\"_blank\">There is a website that actually creates the mad libs by asking you\u00a0for the words and then producing the story for you<\/a>. I tried it, inserting various Australian nouns, verbs\u00a0and adjectives (in bold below), and got the following story as a result:<\/p>\n<table width=\"95%\" border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"title\" align=\"center\"><strong>A Typical History Test<\/strong><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span class=\"ContentBold\">By: Roger Price &amp; Leonard Stern<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span>&nbsp;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"story\">\n<div><em>Instructions: When the <strong>Australia<\/strong> rings, unfold your papers and answer the following <strong>Victorians<\/strong>.<\/em>1. What general won the Battle of <strong>Adelaide<\/strong>.2. Which American <strong>river<\/strong> said, &#8220;Give me liberty or give me <strong>trees<\/strong>&#8220;?3. Who was the first president of the United <strong>animals<\/strong> of <strong>New Zealand<\/strong>?4. Why did Benjamin Franklin fly a\/an <strong>bird<\/strong> during a thunderstorm?5. Who made the first <strong>beautiful<\/strong> flag?<em>Answers to Test:<\/em>1. <strong>Jackson<\/strong>2. <strong>Mel Gibson<\/strong>, when he was executed by <strong>Russell Crowe<\/strong> for <strong>riding<\/strong>.3. <strong>Ian Thorpe<\/strong>4. He was discovering <strong>koalas<\/strong>.5. <strong>Sigrid Thornton<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Finding a fun way to teach children the different types of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc) is important for them to be able to construct good sentences and stories &#8211; but it isn&#8217;t always a fun topic to study!<\/p>\n<p>Mad libs are certainly light-hearted but do require some knowledge of word types to work. The mad libs site includes definitions of the word types, too, to help children learn as the select words.<\/p>\n<p>Do you think this is a useful tool in teaching children what a noun\/verb\/adjective\/etc is? I&#8217;ll be letting my children have a go at these stories and see what they think of them. If I remember, I may even ask their teachers how they view this from an educational point of view.<\/p>\n<p>Use your words wisely!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever done some &#8220;mad libs&#8221;? Is this something you remember fondly from school days &#8211; at least more fondly than the usual grammar lessons? Personally, I hadn&#8217;t heard of mad libs until finding them mentioned in another blog, but apparently they have been widely used to teach children some grammatical terms in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[335,169,338,125,332,166,333,336,334],"class_list":["post-351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bit-off-track","tag-adjectives","tag-fun","tag-game","tag-grammar","tag-mad-libs","tag-nouns","tag-teach","tag-verbs","tag-word-types"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3525,"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions\/3525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordconstructions.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}