Remember Mad Libs, those funny fill-in-the-blank stories you created with friends as a kid? These silly and interactive stories are a great tool for teaching or reviewing parts of speech with learners of all levels. Or, use them with intermediate readers and writers to help develop students' understanding of sentence structure as you have them predict which part of speech belongs in the blank.
The second method requires some preparation on your part. See the image below for an example.
- Method #1: Just plain Mad Libs
- Method #2: Predict the part of speech
The second method requires some preparation on your part. See the image below for an example.
- Start by making one photocopy of a Mad Lib, then "white out" the parts of speech which are printed below the blank lines.
- Draw a scribble into the spaces for "Person in the Room" or "Exclamation" so that students know they do not have to guess these.
- Optional: If you have an image editing program, you can scan the image and add the options Noun-Verb-Adjective-Adverb to the blank spaces. Or simply leave them blank and instruct your students to write the appropriate part of speech in the spaces. Some students may think this is simply a cloze exercise where they should fill in any word they want, so be sure that the students clearly understand they can only complete the blanks with Noun, Verb, Adjective, or Adverb.
- Copy and distribute these for partner or small group work.
- As students feed back their answers, use this as an opportunity to ask students what context clues they used to help them make their guesses.