Fill-in-the-Blank Stories
Looking for a creative and fun way to revise word classes? Try this activity with your class, based on the classic game ‘Mad Libs’. First, children come up with a list of words from specific word classes, before adding their ‘random’ words to a story. The final tales should make grammatical sense, but some will be quite surprising!
Resources:
1) Children create a list of random words with particular prompts
You can read these prompts out one at a time to the class, or have them printed from the provided resource. If using the printed list, fold over the sheet and make sure children don’t peek at the story on the next side until they start writing:
- an adverbial of time
- an adjective
- a proper noun that’s a celebrity’s name
- a number
- a noun that’s a place
- a boy’s name
- a girl’s name
- another name
- one of the bones in your body
- an adjective
- a noun
- another adjective
- a noun
- a type of food
- another type of food
- a drink
- another celebrity’s name
- an adverb
- an adjective
- a noun
2) The children see what story they’ve created with their list of words.
Children fill in the numbered blanks with the corresponding words and read the story they’ve come up with. Encourage anyone with particularly weird or funny ones to share them with the class!
3) Take it further
A useful idea to take from this activity is that words from the same word class can be exchanged freely within a given sentence structure. This can be a handy way to identify a word class if you’re not sure of one.
For example:
Not sure about the word class of ‘early’ in the sentence ‘He got up early.’?
Change the sentence to ‘He got up quickly.’ If you know that ‘quickly’ is an adverb, you know that ‘early’ in the same place in the same sentence must also be an adverb.
Age range: Key stage 2-3
Time: 15-20 minute activity
