Jogging with Forklifts and Other Madness
Last week on the long drive home from Disney World, I introduced my eight-year-old daughter to the wonders of Mad Libs. She, her mom, and I spent over an hour inserting random adverbs, adjectives, nouns and verbs into unseen contexts. Hilarity ensued.
Since then, DIY Mad Libs have become one of our new pastimes. The other night, the kid and I stretched out on the sofa and created our own Mad Libs. We each wrote a page and then asked each other for various parts of speech. This occasion led to much giggling and such sentences as, “He ate a TACO faster than a ROACH can DANCE around the earth (ALL CAPS indicate the words that we mad-libbed)!”
The fun thing about making our own Mad Libs is that we can personalize them to our own lives, and put ourselves in strange situations. That’s how we came up with this little gem, which was based on our morning: “They JOGGED with their new cowgirl and cowboy FORKLIFTS. Then they SPRINTED at the kitchen ELF and typed CUCKOO CLOCKS on their laptops. Daddy made oat CARGO for brunch.” Or this lovely passage: “She curled up in the HOT TUB and slept as IDIOTLY as a BANANA.”
A nice benefit to Mad Libs’ lunacy is that it teaches kids all about the parts of speech. Before we played Mad Libs, my daughter didn’t know what an adverb was. Okay, she still calls it an “adjective that ends in –ly,” but that’s a start. And for kids who may be a little nervous about writing or who – gasp! – think writing can’t be fun, Mad Libs can introduce some of the many pleasures of the written word.
We’ve had hours of fun with this little game, and it cost us nothing than time, some scrap paper, and a bit of imagination. While it sometimes feels like time is far too scarce, we always have plenty of imagination on hand. And reams of scrap paper.
