I was doing some MadLibs with my kiddo the other night and trying to think of how I could adapt them for use in orchestra—I think they’re hilarious. I thought about pulling composer biographies from Wikipedia or something like that and just removing some words, have the kids add their own, but then I thought if they wrote their biographies like this, it would be hilarious.
The nice thing about an activity like this is it can build in some ELA work: I had a lot of questions about “what’s an adverb again? What do you mean ‘ordinal number’?” and it’s reading, etc. etc. But it also occurred to me that with a little bit of adjustment, these could make good getting-to-know you activities at the beginning of the year. You could ask students to provide a bit more factual information (like where they were born) to help them connect with fellow students.
