Mad, but not Crazy
Give me a noun, any noun
I was looking around for something fun to reinforce concepts around story in a way that would stick, which sent me spiralling backwards into memories of some excellent teachers who understood that learning occasionally needs to flirt with silliness to really work. The kind of fun where the rules loosen slightly, and everyone tries to outdo each other with increasingly unhinged contributions.
Which made me think of Mad Libs.
Do you remember those? Do people still play them? This post has not been vetted or endorsed by Mad Libs, but I thank them anyway for hours of unmitigated chaos and, strangely enough, some genuinely profound storytelling lessons.
So here goes. I took Moonrise Kingdom and reverse-engineered the basic premise into a fill-in-the-blank story card. Thank you, Wes Anderson.
Students throw random words into the gaps of a structured paragraph and suddenly end up with an imagined world populated by characters who have something at stake and are somehow running against the clock.
What I like most is how quickly this becomes a space to challenge story structure.
It’s just a quick game.
The results, though, are long-lasting.
