Lego Club Challenge–Lego Mad Libs

So this one was a little out there, even for me.  But I really do like to challenge my kids, and I liked the idea of making multiple pieces that created one big story at the end.

So after we talked about rules, I told my kiddos that our theme today would be “Mad Libs.”  So each kid would be assigned a sentence to a Mad Libs story I wrote just for this event.  You can download the whole thing here, it’s meant for 20 participants but it’s written in a way that some of the sentences can be left out and still make sense. Anyway, after they got their sentence, they would recreate their part of the story as best as they could.  They could of course add to their piece however they wanted, BUT they had to have some element of the original story to keep the overall narrative going.  After the hour was up, we would go around and read it together!!

I wasn’t sure if my kiddos would even know what Mad Libs was, so we did a practice one together on our big dry erase board.  I made sure to talk about what certain parts of speech were, like verbs and adjectives, so that kids weren’t stumped when I approached them later.

So after that I talked one more time about what we were doing and I handed out the Lego buckets and boards.  Then I slowly made my way around the room and handed out the story line-by-line.  I would ask each kid to give me a verb, noun, or whatever the prompt was–I tried to help them as best as I could, like for “verb” I would say “what’s an action you can do in gym class?”  Giving them examples helped too, but sometimes they would just repeat my example back to me, so I asked them to think of something I hadn’t already said, just to make it truly their own idea.  After that I would write it in to the sentence and hand it off to the kid.

I would then read their silly sentence to them, and say that they could add to their piece however they wanted, but some element of the piece had to reflect their part of the story.  Like in this one, all these kiddos had to do was make green machine of some kind.  But they decided to add monsters, weapons, and a camera based on what they thought might happen in the story.  It might not all make sense, but that’s part of the fun to see how other people interpreted what was going on, since they only knew their part of the story.

I wasn’t sure how well this one would turn out, but everyone got it and had fun doing it.  Even my younger kiddos understood the concept and followed along to the premise as best as they could.  At the end, we went around and read our sentences in order.  Everyone loved sharing and following along, as they finally got to see what was going on with the crazy story.

I made a quick movie putting the whole story together, so here’s how ours turned out:

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