Fill-in-the-blank stories for kids: a free word game for home and school

Fill-in-the-blank stories, the word game most people know as Mad Libs, are one of the rare games kids will happily play for an hour that also teach grammar. Every blank asks for a part of speech, so without noticing, kids practice telling a noun from a verb from an adjective. And because the story stays hidden until the end, the payoff is a story they made and can't stop reading out loud.

Why they work so well for kids

• They teach parts of speech by doing. To answer "Adjective" a child has to think of a describing word. After a few stories, noun, verb and adjective stop being vocabulary words and start being tools.
• Kids are in charge of the jokes. Every answer is theirs, so every laugh is theirs too.
• Reading is the reward. The finished story is the best part, which gets reluctant readers reading.
• No wrong answers. "Banana" is a perfectly good answer for "Animal" if it makes the story funnier.

Tips by age

Ages 5 to 7

Play together and read the prompts out loud. Help with word types by giving examples: "An adjective is a describing word, like fluffy or grumpy." Short stories with five to eight blanks work best. On Fun Libs, the wand button suggests a random word when someone gets stuck.

Ages 8 to 10

Let kids play on their own and read the result to the family. Try party mode: everyone takes turns on one device, and each player's words are highlighted in their own color at the end.

Ages 11 and up

Challenge them to write a story of their own. Writing blanks is harder than filling them in: they have to decide which words matter and what part of speech each one is. Our guide on how to write a fill-in-the-blank story walks through it.

Using them in the classroom

Project a story on the board and collect answers from the class before revealing it. Or have small groups write stories about a topic you're studying, like a field trip or a historical event, then swap and play each other's. Stories are free to play in the browser, with no app or account needed. Prefer paper? We have free printable Mad Libs for the classroom, and a Mad Libs word list with a quick guide to parts of speech.

Finding kid-friendly stories

When authors publish a story on Fun Libs they can mark it as kid-friendly. Browse the kids stories and animal stories, or the Fun Libs originals written by our team.

The wobbly dinosaur ate forty-two pancakes and then took a nap in the bathtub.

Mad Libs is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Fun Libs is an independent game and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mad Libs or Penguin Random House.