Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives are FUN!?

Who among us does not remember the tedious business of learning about nouns, verbs, and adjectives? Sitting there in class looking at lists of words that fall under each category. In my mind, language time was the time that the teacher's voice would take on the "wah waaah wah" that Charlie Brown and his friends hear whenever an adult speaks. I'm not really sure how I came to learn anything at all.

Now it is my 2nd grader's turn to learn these things. As he sat at the dining room table rubbing his eyes to try and keep them open while I explained that a noun was a person place or thing, I suddenly became inspired. I stopped. I wrote a quick "mad lib" with appropriate blanks and then had him supply verbs, nouns, and adjectives accordingly. Of course he had no idea how the "verb ending with -ing" would be used in our story.

He was skeptical at first and still bored as he gave me examples of each part of speech. When I handed him the story with his words filled in, the fun had begun. He was laughing so hard at sentences like "There were red people jumping everywhere." Now he is hungry to do more "mad libs" (click the title of this post to go to a page with printable mad libs) and the boy can spout off parts of speech like a pro. I have a friend who calls this "delight directed learning". And so it is.