Materials needed: small slips of paper, pencils, paper bags or baskets
How to play:
Bag #1 On a piece of paper, each family member writes an adjective.
These words should be good describers — “enormous,” “slippery” or “bright blue” are more useful than “neat,” “nice” or “good.” Those
slips go into paper bag or basket #1.
Bag #2 Then write a kind of person or animal, the quirkier the
better. “Alligator,” “superhero” or “princess” are
good examples. These go in bag #2.
Bag #3 gets action words (present tense works best). “Jumps,” “howls” or “grabs” would
work.
Bag #4 gets nouns. Singular or plural. For example, “flowers,” “sheep” or “police
cars.”
Now, without looking, pull one slip of paper out of each bag, and put them in a line, 1-4. Here was our first try:
You now have your wacky headline. You’ll brainstorm from those four words. In our case, I’m thinking there’s a dog thief who wants a pet hippo, and speeds into the zoo at night to take one. I’m betting he’s
not quite so fast on the way out!
If you don’t like that one, or you’ve gone as far as you can, pick another one. We did, and this came out:
You may need to add a word to help it make sense. We changed “shrieked” to “shrieked at.” So why would a furry monster shriek at a baker? Maybe the name was not spelled right on the monster’s birthday cake!
For fun, here are our other combinations:
All of them have potential, except perhaps the last one. As big a fan
as I am of classic westerns, I’m not seeing a whole plot around
flipping sunglasses.
That’s how you do it. You can just make up a spoken tale,
or take the time to write it down. Maybe your child will want to draw
a picture once you’re done inventing your wacky story.
— Bruce Van Patter
