Valentine's Day Mad Libs for Kids (Free Printable)

With no prep and resulting in tons of fun, these cute Valentine’s Day Mad Libs are the perfect activity for home or school!

Why do you want this Valentine’s Day activity?

Easy way to to teach parts of speech
Painless grammar practice
Older kids love it; younger children love it — basically, it’s for kids of all ages
No prep for you; just print and go!
Tons of silliness and laughter
So stinkin’ much fun!

How do you play Valentine’s Day Mad Libs?

Mad Libs is a fill in the blank word game that requires at least two people:

Reader (1 person)
The Players (1+ people)

The reader is the keeper of the printed story. Their job is to ask the others to fill in the blank without letting them see what is going on in the story.

Each story is missing words. Underneath the blank space, there will be a part of speech, or a word prompt. The reader asks the other players to come up with ideas that fit the word prompts (i.e. “I need a noun.”)

The players will come up with ideas (“How about ‘pig’? What about ‘fire’? etc) The reader chooses one of those and writes it in the blank space.

Then, the reader will continue asking for words until all the blanks are filled.

The last step is for the reader to read the story back with all of the players’ words in . This should result in a silly stories and tons of side-splitting laughter!

Where can I use this activity?

Glad you asked! Valentine’s Day Mad Libs can be used almost any time! This works as a fun family activity. My family loves to do this around the dinner table while we wait for our fancy Valentines meal. My husband and I take turns being the reader, while the kids give us their list of words. This is how I know the activity works for very young kids. We started my daughter on this when she was in preschool, and she loves Mad Libs! Playing this game has become one of our Valentines Day traditions.

This is also a fun activity for school parties. It takes almost no prep work, and can be used with kids as young as kindergarten. My experience with groups of kindergartners and Valentine party games is that you need to do them in short time chunks. They struggle to wait for the entire story to be filled in before they get the payoff.

For these Valentine Mad Libs, I’d suggest maybe a paragraph at a time. Another tip: You also can’t just ask for nouns and adjectives. Instead, you’ll have to say things like “I need a thing. Can everyone look around the classroom? Does anyone see a thing?” or “I need a describing word. Maybe something like ‘big’ or ‘stinky’.”

Done like that, this is a fun game for all school ages. Also, kids this age love the word “stinky.” No idea why; it’s just facts.

If you have older children, they can run the entire game themselves. Hand it to your bored child, and they and their best friend can have a fun time with the world’s greatest word game! For teachers, this makes a fun sponge activity. It’s also a great way to keep early finishers busy!

More Fun Valentines Activities (that you can use to teach something too!)

Straw Rocket Valentines – Propulsion Mechanics
Valentines Airplanes – Lift and Pressure
14 Free or Cheap Activities for Valentines – Languages, Arts and Crafts
Heart Catcher Cup and Ball Game – Hand-Eye Coordination

Reviewing the Parts of Speech

You may not know this, but my day job is middle school English teacher. Believe it or not, I get very excited about grammar. However, I know that many folks haven’t looked at grammar with anything but a side eye for most of their life. If you need a quick review on all those part of speech terms, then here you go:

Noun: a person, place, thing, or idea. Examples: my sister, the living room, a potato peeler, or love. Feel free to change a player’s word choice to singular or plural to fit the sentence (i.e. jaguar to jaguars).
Verb: an action word. Examples: run, jump, climb, etc. Again, feel free to change the tense or form of the word to fit the story (i.e. change “run” to “ran” or “was running”)
Adjective: a word that describes a noun. Examples: big, purple, scratchy, sweet
Adverb: a word that describes a verb. These often end in -ly. Examples: quickly, sneakily, lovingly
Interjection: an exclamation word. Examples: Wow! Oh no! Eeek!

We’re not going to mess around with conjunctions, pronouns, or prepositions today. Your silly story doesn’t need them!