Build Your Own Template
- Grade band
- 5-6
- Duration
- 50 minutes
- Skill
- Syntax, strategic word removal
- Standards
- L.5.3a — Expand, combine, and reduce sentences for meaning, reader/listener interest, and style.
- L.6.3a — Vary sentence patterns for meaning, reader/listener interest, and style.
- Materials
- Student worksheet (printable, included)
- Lined paper for the original paragraph
- Pencils
Learning objectives
- Students will be able to identify the part of speech of a word in the context of a sentence they wrote.
- Students will be able to strategically select words to remove from a paragraph so that the remaining structure still makes grammatical sense.
- Students will be able to evaluate which word removals preserve a story's coherence and explain why others break it.
Lesson procedure
- Warm-up (5 minutes) — I Do. Show a single sentence with one word blanked and swapped for something absurd (for example, "The dog barked at the mailbox" → "The dog barked at the trombone"). Ask: why does this still work grammatically even though it doesn't make sense? Establish that "mailbox" and "trombone" are both nouns.
- Write an original paragraph (12 minutes) — You Do. Students write a short original paragraph (5-7 sentences) on a topic of their choice — a story, a description of a place, an event. Emphasize normal, complete sentences; the silliness comes later.
- Mark the parts of speech (10 minutes) — You Do. Students go back through their own paragraph and label the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) above at least eight words — enough to have real options when choosing blanks.
- Build the template (13 minutes) — You Do. Using the worksheet, students choose 6-8 of their labeled words to blank out, replacing each with an underlined space and a part-of-speech label, the same format Giggle Gaps and Mad Libs use. Remind them: articles, conjunctions, and pronouns are off-limits as blanks.
- Trade and fill (7 minutes) — You Do. Students trade templates with a partner, fill in the partner's blanks without seeing the original, and read the result aloud.
- Reflection and share-out (3 minutes) — Closure. Students complete the reflection prompt on the worksheet, then a few volunteers share one removal that worked well and one that broke the story.
Printable worksheet
Step 1: Write your paragraph. Write 5-7 original sentences below.
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Step 2: Build your template. Rewrite your paragraph below, replacing 6-8 words with a blank and a part-of-speech label (noun, verb, adjective, or adverb) — the same format as a Mad Lib. Do not blank articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, but), or pronouns (it, she, they).
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Step 3: Reflection. After trading and filling in a partner's template:
Which word removal made the story funniest when refilled? _______________________________
Was there a removal that broke the story's grammar or made it confusing? Which one, and why?
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Background for the teacher
This lesson flips the usual fill-in-the-blank activity around: instead of filling in someone else's blanks, students create the blanks themselves. That reversal is the point. To decide which word in a sentence can be safely removed and swapped, a student has to correctly identify its part of speech and understand its grammatical role — a much deeper form of assessment than picking a word from a list.
The common misconception to watch for: students often blank out words based on which ones seem "interesting" or "important" rather than which part of speech they are, and end up removing articles, conjunctions, or pronouns that break the sentence's grammar when swapped ("a," "the," "and," "it"). Reinforce that a good blank is any noun, verb, adjective, or adverb — words that can be swapped for another word of the same type without breaking the sentence around them.
Differentiation
Support: Provide a pre-written paragraph with parts of speech already labeled, so students practice choosing which labeled words to blank without also having to generate and label original writing.
Extension: Challenge students to write a paragraph where every sentence uses a different sentence structure (question, exclamation, compound sentence) and to blank at least one word from each sentence type.
ELL support: Provide a part-of-speech reference card with example words in categories (noun/verb/adjective/adverb) so students can double-check a label without needing to recall the grammar term from memory alone.
IEP/504 support: Provide the pre-written, pre-labeled paragraph from the Support note above, and reduce the required blanks from 6-8 down to 4.
Answer key (for teachers)
This lesson is fully open-ended — there is no single correct paragraph or template. When checking student work, verify that: (1) every blanked word is actually a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, not an article, conjunction, or pronoun; and (2) the part-of-speech label on each blank matches the word that was originally there.
Digital extension (optional)
Students who enjoy building their own templates can see the same idea in Giggle Gaps, where every story is built exactly this way — labeled blanks standing in for a specific part of speech. Comparing a professionally built template to their own is a natural extension of today's reflection questions.