Frosty the Snowman Oulipo

What You Need:

• Dictionary
• Highlighter
• Pencil
• Paper
• "Frosty the Snowman" lyrics, easy to find on-line

What You Do:

1. Once you've printed out a copy of the song have your child begin highlighting all the nouns they can find. If they aren't sure have them mark the word any way, when you look it up together it will build their vocab.
2. Once they're done picking out the nouns they can start rewriting the song lyrics.
3. When they come to the first highlighted word have them stop to look it up in the dictionary. Getting familiar with reference books like the dictionary boosts their problem solving skills and critical thinking.
4. Once they find that first noun help them count three nouns down. Not all of the entries will be nouns and many will have multiple meanings! This is the fun part. Here they'll have a chance to see how language is used – how one word, like "walk" can be used as a verb or a noun. Don't worry about lingering over every word, unless of course they're curious, or you are—keep it light and fun.
5. Have them continue writing the lyrics with new nouns until they're done. For example, "snowman" might be replaced with "snowstorm." The outcome will always be a little different depending on the dictionary you use.
6. Try singing their newly penned version and see how it sounds!

If you want to lighten the load on this exercise, reduce the count from three to two, or even just to one noun away- the shorter the distance traveled from the original word the more similar the words will be. To make it more challenging up the ante to as many as six or seven. This lyrical mad libs is based on an Oulipo technique called N+7, traveling seven nouns from the original word to create something different and playful.