Story Structure Mad Lib

For the first session I need to see what my client is capable of and decide what goals we need to set. To do this, I need to probe (I hate that word) various skills. Probing can make for a very boring therapy session. It usually consists of giving informal tests on various things. Meaning that the child would need to be sitting and responding for 50 minutes. As soon as my supervisor told me that I need to probe my student's story structure knowledge I started to brainstorm ideas to make it a bit more fun.

I must admit, I really am not creative. I've never been a great artist, storyteller, or anything. However, I'm lucky because ideas tend to just fall from the sky and land in my head. That's what happened the other night, I was about to fall asleep and suddenly sat up and exclaimed "Mad Libs!"

In other words, a simple but fun story structure probe was born. You all know what Mad Libs are, right? It is a game where parts of a speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) are cut out of a story. One person has the story and asks for parts of speech and the other player comes up with random words (Player 1: "Give me a noun" Player 2: "Octopus"). I used to play them with my friends in elementary school and got such a kick out of them. Combining silliness and the parts of speech was alway a useful learning experience.

So anyway, I decided to use a homemade Mad Lib see if my kid could identify parts of the story structure. The parts of a story are: character, setting, problem, action to solve problem, and result.

Here is the Mad Lib that I created:

You can click on the image to make it bigger

It's not as exciting as I would like but it works. Since all of the story structures are left out, it might not be as funny as normal Mad Libs. With regular Mad Libs the story structure is there so when you add goofy nouns, adjectives, and verbs the story can become quite ridiculous. I just hope that this is more entertaining that just giving a test and saying "Write down what a character is..."

I'll let you know how it goes next week!