Grammar with Mad Libs

I think proper grammar is important. There, I said it. I spent three years as an editorial assistant for an academic communication journal back in graduate school. The experience definitely heightened my awareness of grammatical errors. Now, errors seem to flash red to me. I even pointed out to my daughter once, at church, that the words to the song on the screen at the front of the church had an improper use of the word "your" (you're should have been used). She, appropriately, elbowed me.....hard.

I use Growing With Grammar as the core grammar curriculum with all three of my children. I am extremely pleased with this program and highly recommend it. Practice is good, though, particularly when working with abstract concepts like the parts of speech. My fourth and second grade boys LOVE doing Mad Libs as part of our school day. My sixth grade daughter tolerates it and sometimes enjoys it but I think she is growing out of the "anything silly is funny" sense of humour.

In case you are not familiar with Mad Libs, they are inexpensive, consumable books with stories centered around a theme. We just finished "Christmas Mad Libs." Within the text of the story, there are blank spaces in which to insert parts of speech. So, a particular blank might indicate that a plural noun is needed or a past tense verb, for example. At the end, the story is read and everybody breaks into helpless laughter.

The issue I had when doing Mad Libs is that everytime one of my boys would need to supply an adjective, they never failed to ask "What is an adjective again?" Every single time.

As I was patiently explaining to one of my boys the definition of an adjective and giving some examples for about the 8th time during our Mad Libs activity, I had an idea. I decided to take down our big calendar in the school room and make a parts of speech bulletin board instead.

I also checked out two children's books about adjectives from the library and used them to create a poster of adjective choices. Now, the boys can look over to the poster and pick an adjective that they would like. I plan to do a similar poster of adverbs as well since adverbs are another common stumbling block for my boys.