Most of them [the local people] only speak Spanish, but I can communicate by making signs with my penis.

In another story, How to Enjoy Yourself on the Beach, I ended up reading about using toboggans to play volleyball, and enjoying a lunch of hard-boiled cows. And (one for adult eyes only), in the Vacations story, we ended up with the sentence “I like to spend my time reading or screwing.” Jim and I both nearly laughed up a lung on that one.

Anyways, back to the ‘educational benefits’. This Mad Libs app suits both my boys very well right now. For Daegan, who is currently learning parts of speech in his grammar lessons, the connection is obvious. And as part of his paragraph writing lessons this year he is also working on using more descriptive language (“petrified” instead of “scared”, “enormous” instead of “big”, etc.), it is also giving him a chance to flex this ‘skill muscle’ as well. For Gareth, the grammar component is largely over his head, but the stories are giving him reading practice, and the way the app has set up the prompts is brilliant. For the vast majority of general “noun”, “verb”, “adjective”-type prompts, there is a ‘hint’ button in the top right corner that you can tap and a selection of nouns, verbs, or adjectives go floating by on banners, allowing you to choose one:

This is excellent reading practice for Gareth, and he is surprising us by some of the words he is reading—like “stadium”. Typing in the words could give a child spelling practice, and unlike the pencil and paper Mad Libs, these apps make it easy to ‘erase’ your answers and play again and again. We enjoyed the free app so much we bought one of the two paid apps currently available. At $3.99 they are expensive for an app, but that price is still cheaper than any paper version of Mad Libs we saw in the store.

The next day, after listening to Gareth complain about how much printing there was to do during homeschool, and “couldn’t I just read the question and say the answer, and you write it Mom?”, I found him in the homeschool room with his new Pokemon book. (And yes, I often will do the writing of his answers if he asks, especially if the point of the exercise is more to do with reading, following directions, comprehension, or specific content than the skill of penmanship):

(The printing above is Gareth listing off various Pokemon types, BTW).

Of course, the above took place early in the week, with the boys ready and raring to go on grade 2 and 4. Today, in contrast, I received the following from Daegan, who was doing some pages about subjects and predicates. Note especially answers 2 and 6:

Yes, indeed, son…”farted loudly” is a predicate and not a subject. (Rather unsuccessfully stifling a giggle). Let’s move on! One positive of this, though, is that Gareth now “can’t wait!” to begin his Grammar and Punctuation workbook, whereas previously the subject held zero interest.

We talked briefly about what subjects and predicates were, and then mixed the subjects and predicates up, and put them face down into piles:

Daegan then made “silly sentences”, learning that subjects and predicates can be mixed and matched. This activity was met with lots of smiles and giggles, and even rolling on the floor at one point:

Here’s some of the silly sentences he made:

And I’d like it noted, for the record, that not one of these sentences was about dinosaurs! We’ll build on this activity in future, changing out nouns and verbs a la Mad Libs, adding in adjectives and adverbs, etc.