Savvy Parenting : Silliness For Sale: Mad Libs The Savvy Source for Parents

You may remember the years of your lost youth filling out Mad Libs with friends and cracking up again and again. Your memories are likely set against the soundtrack of your favorite record. Well, your kids won't have the first clue what a record is, but Mad Libs are still around, better than ever. Get some Mad Libs, and get ready for that rare combination of a grammar lesson and a laugh.

Here's the drill:

You can start with a Mad Libs Junior if you think your child will balk at having to learn the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adverb first. The Mad Libs Junior pads are bigger overall and with bigger typeface and blanks, which is nice. But lovers of Mad Libs classics will despair to see the absence of adverbs entirely and the little symbols as prompts, in place of the parts of speech. There are, however, lots of fun titles like Alphabet for the earliest new-generation Mad Libs fans.

If you need adverbs (and yes, we at Savvy do, too), start with some "regular" Mad Libs, like Vacation Fun.

For extra creativity points, or to make the zaniness of a Mad Libs reading even more pointed by mixing up crazy words into an already known text, make a photocopy of a page of your child's favorite book and then mark out (either with correcting tape or just a dark marker) a few words here and there, noting the part of speech as you go. Now you've got DIY Mad Libs.

Then ask your child for just the words to put in the blanks. Don't read the sentence; Mad Libs depend entirely on lack of context. Just get the words to fill in the blanks and then read back the entire, nonsensical thing.

And remind your child to breathe every so often between the gales of laughter.

Comment(0)