There are two things my children love – reading or telling stories and being silly! This post idea came yesterday, and I just had to share it with you as it encourages quality time together AND learning AND fun!

While pulling out things to pack yesterday, my son came across some old Mad Libs that I had. My brother and I LOVED playing these as children! When my mom would go to the outlet malls, we always stopped by this one store and bought Mad Libs to entertain us through the day and long drive back home.

We spent hours and hours doing these, laughing until we cried. While having fun, we were learning – how about that! For those of you that might not be familiar with Mad Libs, they are short stories that have certain words removed. Whenever a word is missing, the blank line tells you to add in a verb, noun, name, color, etc.

Then, once your playing partner gives you all the ‘missing’ words (they don’t know what the story is about, they just know which parts of speech to say a word for), you go back and read the story with the new words inserted. It’s really a hoot!

DS1 was really wanting me to read those books yesterday, but I told him he was really not old enough to do them yet. He persisted, and I began flipping through a book. Turns out, we had already written some of the words in a few of the stories (we used to write on a separate piece of paper to make them last longer).

As I read the stories, he laughed and laughed! He’ll be 5 this June, but he already knows when a story sounds silly. Seems like this is a natural thing for him, he loves to make everything silly.

Last night before I turned in, I decided to write a short story just for the kids that was more on their level. It was a story about going to the zoo. I tried to keep the missing words things they would understand. Boy were they excited when I pulled it out this morning. They weren’t sure what we were doing right away (I was being secretive), but once they did, they really got into it. We read stories over and over, it was a lot of fun!

Besides the fun, I was able to sneak in that a noun is a person/ place/ or thing (we just used a thing), as well as a verb being an action word (something we can do). And as I thought last night, one story wasn’t enough!

So, this is where being creative was really fun… I began taking children’s songs and using these for our Mad Libs. They are familiar with how the songs are supposed to go, so when we insert new words, they really think they are being VERY silly!

Try it – it’s fun, and you can throw in some education as well. Let me hear how it goes for you…

Mrs. Candace