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Desperate Teachers Cheerfully Astonish Lovable Dummies

If you were to ask any of my children what their favorite class was, none of them would answer Language Arts.  After today's lesson they may have changed their minds or at least moved the dial closer to the "like" mark.  The scheduled lesson was to correct a previous paper for redundancy and wordiness.  I felt like sleeping just reading the description.  I am a firm believer in editing one's own work and I realize the importance, but we needed a break.  I chose the optional lesson today. 

Each student was to write an article based upon something that happened this morning.  As every good journalist knows, they were required to include the 5 W's and an H.  To their relief they only had to write one to two paragraphs.  Next they identified each noun, adjective and adverb.  From that point they were allowed to create their own skeleton for a Mad Lib from their original article.  What fun! 

To wrap things up, I broke out my Mad Libs card game.  Each card has either a noun, verb, adjective or adverb.  For each round, players are asked to use their cards to create grammatically correct sentences.  The sentences do not need to make sense.  Each round requires different sentence lengths.  For example, round 1 requires one 4-word sentence and one 6-word sentence.  The game is similar to gin.  The first to lay down all of their sentences wins a bonus for being first and the other players get a point for each card that they used to complete a sentence.  There is also a "Ten Card Rule" that states any sentence using all ten cards in your hand for one sentence automatically trumps other hands and scores double.  We didn't have any ten card sentences, but we did have some impressive and very silly sentences.

These are the days that I love homeschooling.  I am so very blessed to be able to spend this precious time with my children.  What better lesson to teach than the love of learning.