Terrific Tuesday: Make Writing More (Adjective)

I remember fondly the days of my youth, thumbing through the latest flyer offering from Scholastic Book orders. Mad Libs were always a classroom favorite, and I recall many hours filling these in with my best friend. They never failed to bring laughter and good times.

Laughter and good times: Wouldn't those be 2 words you would like to associate with your next language arts lesson? We all tend to get stuck in our writing ruts, and using the same, tired words is a pitfall that few writers can say that they do not experience. If your students are feeling the word usage doldrums, take a mini-lesson to (re)introduce Mad Libs to them. It will show them that just one word choice change can make a big difference in the final outcome of a story. As the Mad Libs books are still published, the website has recently been relaunched, and an app is available for iPad/iPhone, there are many ways to play with words at school and home:

 Be sure to follow @OriginalMadLibs for a daily Twitter feed dose of a Mad Lib sentence to start your lessons. Remember the rules: Do not show your audience the story. Simply ask them for the words missing from the story (i.e. a name, an adjective), then see the silly results unfold.

If students have forgotten their parts of speech, Houghton Mifflin Company's Education Place website has a quick refresher webpage about them, along with some "Wacky Web Tales" of their own. Here is the beginning, and end result, of my version of "The Perfect Day Show":