First Day of Class: “Mad Libs” Activity

Need a quick activity idea to get students speaking to each other? Bonus if the activity is a quick review of some grammatical terms? Enter Mad Libs, that fill-in-the-blanks game that most students will be familiar with from their childhood. Mad Libs has seen a recent comeback among adults and I’ve even spotted them in hip East Village shops and places like Urban Outfitters.

The idea is simple: in partners, one student provides words that are specific parts of speech (noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) or vocabulary (name of a country, etc.) while the second student writes them down to fill in the blanks of a story. I’ve adapted this idea in French to use on the first day of class. The story the students “write” is entitled “Qui suis-je?” and they seem to find the resulting meaning entertaining.

You can download the file I created for this exercise here. You’ll only need to print out half as many copies as you have students.