A numbered word bank across the top of the sheet asking for an adjective, an animal, a verb ending in ing, a silly sound, a colour, a number and so on. Fill all eighteen in without reading the story underneath, then read the story out with the words dropped into the gaps. The story is set large and widely spaced so the blanks are easy to write into.
The bank comes first, and that is the whole trick
The instruction on the sheet says to fill in the word bank before reading the story, and the fun collapses if anybody peeks. One person asking the room for the words out loud, without saying where they go, is the version that works best.
Each blank in the story is labelled underneath with the same number and word type as the bank, so when the reader reaches gap eleven they know to look at eleven in the bank. Nobody has to keep track of anything.
Three stories
The Night Before has eighteen blanks and follows the usual quiet house, the sleigh and a note left behind. The Letter to the North Pole has nineteen and is written as a child's letter. The Dinner That Went Wrong has seventeen and covers the cooking.
All three are chosen from the Story control above the sheet. The word bank in each asks for a different mix, so running the second one straight after the first does not produce the same shaped answers.
Doing it without the bank
The word bank control has a Leave off setting. That prints the story alone, with the labelled blanks still in place, which is the version for somebody filling it in on their own at a table rather than collecting words from a room.
It also makes a sensible writing exercise for a class: the labels under each gap are the parts of speech, and the sentence around them makes the mistakes obvious when it is read back.
Questions
- How many blanks are in the Christmas mad libs?
- Eighteen in the first story, nineteen in the second and seventeen in the third. Each one is numbered and labelled with the kind of word wanted, both in the bank and under the gap in the story.
- How many stories are there?
- Three: The Night Before, The Letter to the North Pole and The Dinner That Went Wrong. The control above the sheet switches between them and each has its own word bank.
- How do you play it?
- One person collects the eighteen words from the room without saying what the story is, writing them in the bank at the top. Then they read the story aloud with those words in the gaps.
- Can I print the story without the word bank?
- Yes. Switch the word bank control to Leave off and the sheet prints the story alone with the labelled blanks still in place, which suits somebody filling it in on their own.