Playing a Basic Casual Game
Every deck comes with 8 wild cards and 10 make-your-owns for custom words and vocabulary. There are 5-prebuilt gameplay options for Grammatical Nonsense, but to play a standard casual game with two players, start by setting aside any cards you don’t wish to use, then take your shuffled deck and deal 7 cards to each player. On your turn, draw one card, and play one card to tell your own unique story. You can play your words anywhere in the sentence, even if it isn’t yet grammatical. This also offers a good opportunity for parents or teachers to jump in and ask questions about how different words are being used. The game ends once one of the players reaches at least 7 cards in a row, as long as they follow the 3 cardinal rules of the game: your sentence needs a Verb; your sentence needs either a Noun or a Pronoun; and your sentence can’t end with a conjunction. You are encouraged to add or change rules to suit your unique needs. In total, a game takes anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes, depending on the number of players, gameplay variant, and rulesets you’ve chosen to go with.
Playing a Basic Classroom Game
There are many ways to use Grammatical Nonsense in the classroom. For a basic classroom lesson on the parts of speech, you might start by distributing one deck to each student, then having them sort the cards based on their parts of speech. This sorting exercise is a productive learning activity on its own, and when it's finished, you can start your lesson by asking students to choose either an article or pronoun from their decks, then a noun, verb, adverb, and so on, until you’ve worked your way through every part of speech at least once. While students create their own sentences in front of them, you’ll choose words provided by your students, writing a collective story on the board and discussing each part of speech as you go along. Once you’ve completed this introductory lesson, you can go around and ask students to read their stories aloud. Following activities might focus on particular parts of speech, or you may use the cards to discuss other verbal, grammatical, literacy, or storytelling concepts as helpful for your students. With add-on subject packs, you can even customize your students’ decks for particular classroom units to specialize your gameplay options and build relevant classroom themes within students’ stories.
