Inside: Find strategies to motivate speaking and participation in your Spanish classes, as well as detailed activity explanations for my favorite communicative resources (and a few FREE downloads!)
Discover our top list of tv shows to learn spanish for beginners. Our list of Netflix shows will have you forget your learning a language.
Inside: Find strategies to motivate speaking and participation in your Spanish classes, as well as detailed activity explanations for my favorite communicative resources (and a few FREE downloads!)
Spanish Bread are soft bread rolls that are filled with a sweet, buttery paste, dusted with bread crumbs and baked to golden perfection.
Inside: Find my favorite approaches to introducing new vocabulary in Spanish class, in a comprehensible and FUN way! Get access to free resources to try!
In "Flirting in Spanish: 18 Easy Spanish Phrases for Dating" we’ve given you a few choice phrases that should be easy to remember and quick to charm.
Inside: Conversation Jenga for the language class. When I put my students in a speaking situation, I like to make it low-pressure and fun. We’ve really enjoyed conversation Jenga lately– which is obviously better than a worksheet with questions to ask each other. In a sense, conversation Jenga is an authentic speaking situation because it’s a
This huge list of favorite books give you the best of authentic Spanish books for kids, all written by native speakers!
Inside: Find free downloads, a detailed gameplay tutorial, and differentiation strategies for playing Taco Tuesday with your middle and high school Spanish classes.
Spanish body parts activities include movement, games, songs and picture books. 20 favorite activities to teach useful vocabulary for body parts in Spanish.
Inside: Authentic & easy Spanish songs to learn Spanish and for beginner classes. As a new teacher, I so badly wanted my students to feel the magic of Spanish. I loved my Latin music, and thought they’d love some realsongs to learn Spanish, too. The problem was that I didn’t know HOW to bridge authentic resources
Memes for Spanish Teachers: Memes that only Spanish teachers will understand CI WORKS:Memes about using Comprehensible Input Fotos Chistosas Chistes en forma de dibujos Chistes 20 terrible …
Inside: teach and learn Spanish with music, through 30 authentic songs full of the subjunctive, conditional, and commands. Finally, a list of authentic Spanish songs for advanced classes! My lists for Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 are already popular, and this one should round it all out. Using authentic songs gets significantly easier with upper grades, as you aren’t sheltering
Use logic puzzles in langauge classes as a way to provide students with repeated exposure to vocabulary structures. Get easy puzzles in Spanish and French!
Spanish Adjective Activities | Teaching descriptive adjectives is one of my favorite units in Spanish class! Here are five fun activities for teaching Spanish adjectives to describe a person physically or by personality. Find a complete unit with everything you need to get students describing themselves and others. Plus practice with no-prep worksheets, find a list of adjectives to define and find in a word search, and draw self-portraits to label physical characteristics, and other games!
Have you started Weekend Chat with your Spanish classes? It's a great routine to get into for preterite practice. It's awesome to have something like this ready to go every Monday - there’s no Sunday night, “wait, what are we doing tomorrow?” feeling! Here are 7 easy ways to mix up weekend chat in your classroom!
Spanish Bread are soft bread rolls that are filled with a sweet, buttery paste, dusted with bread crumbs and baked to golden perfection.
Here are five bundles of some of the best Spanish activities to keep students engaged and having fun all year long in Spanish class! 1. Word Wall Bundle I love using word walls. They are such an effective way to display and reinforce vocabulary! Fill your walls with cognates, high frequency words, pronouns, interrogatives and visually support students on reading and writing activities all year long. This bundle includes four word walls with over 200 words! Students of all ages will refer to the
Visiting a neighborhood market is a great way to get an insight into local life. Here are the Madrid food markets all gourmands should visit!
Want to learn to speak Spanish like a native? Listening to Spanish podcasts is effective and FREE! Check out my top recommendations (the podcasts I actually listen to to improve my own Spanish!)
These 6 short clips are great to include in your daily routine unit for a clip chat or movie talk in Spanish class!
Spanish speaking activities, icebreakers & games to get students speaking Spanish!
Struggling to learn Spanish as an adult? These 21 must-know learning hacks will help you become FLUENT in Spanish FAST.
Inside: Teach yourself Spanish, with these free online Spanish resources. This is the list I wish I’d had as a new teacher, or as a Spanish learner myself. Here I’ve collected my favorite online Spanish resources, and all are free (though some may have paid upgrade options). These are great for supplementing in the classroom or
These are my favorite activities for French class - Practice French vocabulary, verb conjugation, and grammar with these engaging activities.
SpanishDictionary.com is the world's largest online Spanish-English dictionary, translator, and reference tool.
When I was growing up, my family did their grocery shopping on Thursday. That was pay day and they got paid every week. My Mother never made a shopping list that I remember and she must have kept…
FOOD IS ONE OF THOSE TOPICS IN WORLD LANGUAGE CLASSES that gives a lot of bang for the buck.. we all like to talk about food, and there are so many ways to make it part of our lessons. Since I am a huge advocate of hands on learning, I use both plastic and paper play food whenever I am doing activities related to food- not only do they give little hands something to engage in, but it also provides visual support for my students. And this applies to all age groups, not just the littles- when I was teaching Russian to adults, I frequently incorporated manipulatives to support learning. Here are some ideas for using play food in your class: *CATEGORIZE ACCORDING TO PREFERENCE: This is a simple way to practice expressions of preference, even if your students don't know the words for all the food items. For my younger students, I make up ziploc baggies or an envelope with approximately 10 foods in them along with a set of cards indicating 'I like', 'I really like', 'I don't like', and 'I don't know' (for those foods they've never tried) and divide the class into pairs. Each pair gets a baggie and takes turns categorizing the foods based on their preferences. After a few minutes, I have them leave the foods in a pile, and they move to the next set (each baggie has different foods in it) so they can categorize again. I encourage them to say how they feel about each food in Spanish as they place it under a preference card-this is the focus of the activity, using the preference phrases themselves. For older kids, you could have them add reasons why they like or don't like a particular food- It's too spicy, It's sweet, It's gross, etc. This makes for a great (and simple!) Interpersonal Activity, particularly for novice speakers! *MY FAVORITE MEAL: Use paper plates to provide the starting prop, and have kids "fill" their plate with their favorite meal- could be breakfast, lunch or dinner! You could also title this: A MEAL I REALLY LIKE, since sometimes kids have a hard time deciding between multiple favorites. Kids can then turn and talk with the person on their left, then switch and turn and talk with the person on their right. I love activities where kids share with one another, it builds community by providing opportunities to learn about each other! *PLAY RESTAURANT OR MARKET: Play food lends itself really well to activities involving restaurant or market vocabulary and provide a hands on component to the action. Students can "order" food which is then delivered to them (put the play food on a plate!), or the play food can be displayed as part of a market stand where students can "buy" what they need to make a dish or to get items on a shopping list. This is a fun way to integrate imaginary play for little kids, and manners expressions such as 'please', 'thank you' and 'you're welcome'. *"ILLUSTRATE A RECIPE": Provide students with an authentic recipe and a basket or bin of printable food. Have them read the recipe and line up the ingredients below the recipe. This is a great center/ station activity! ALTERNATIVE: Have multiple sets of play food available, pair students up and have one student tell his/her partner which foods are needed for a particular recipe or dish. This is an easy way to add CULTURE to your classes! *PLAY 20 QUESTIONS: Have student go out into the hall and choose a food from a basket or bag. Upon re-entering the classroom, the rest of the class tries to guess the mystery food by asking a series of questions that can be answered with yes/no. Is it a fruit? Is it round? Is it an orange? etc. Once guessed, or the 20 questions are spent and the food revealed, choose another student and play again! *PLAY 'I'M GOING ON A PICNIC AND I'M BRINGING...': I love this old favorite, but I find it is easier for students to engage in when we have the food visuals in front of them. It helps with recall, and provides some structure and limits to what they can choose from. I put out a bunch of play food that they know the names of and as one is named by a student, they put it in front of them so we can all reference it. This also helps keep the game moving, as the task focuses on remembering the Spanish vocabulary, rather than what someone said on down the circle. *WHAT'S MISSING?: One of my favorite games with the littles is this one- place 4-5 foods in front of you, on the board or in a pocket chart. Have kids close their eyes, and take a food away. Have them open their eyes again and identify the missing food. After a few rounds, take away two foods, then three, etc. The funniest is when you take them all away! :) *CATEGORIZE INTO...: There are so many ways students can categorize food- healthy vs unhealthy foods, groups based on the food pyramid, meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), foods they've tried vs foods they haven't, types of food (fruits, veggies, drinks, desserts, etc), and so on. Provide a graphic organizer for students to use as a template, placing food in categories they write at the top (or have the categories pre-written), ideal for novice speakers! When focusing on the category headers, this also means you can use foods that students still haven't learnt yet since the key language being used is the set of headers, rather than the individual words, meaning you can extend the activity beyond the food vocabulary set you've identified as core. *LUNCH TALK... an every more popular activity for class, lunch talk is a great way to incorporate authentic communication in a personalized format. The essence of lunch talk is taking the opportunity to talk with your students about what they have for lunch (or what they ate), which also allows for practice of high frequency phrases such as 'I have/I don't have', 'I like/don't like (and all the other variants), I eat (along with expressions of frequency), etc. The tricky part of lunch talk, most especially for novice speakers, is their limited vocabularies, yet quite unlimited set of possibilities in terms of what they might be having for lunch. One way to support your students is, instead of expecting verbal output of what they have, have them SHOW you using PLAY FOOD! This then allows you, as the teacher, to facilitate interaction and reaction (oh, I like that too!, Mmm, yummy! I eat ___ that every day, too, etc) in the target language. You can then scaffold and support students in using some of the phrases mentioned above, and you can encourage more general words, like 'sandwich' (instead of peanut butter & jelly sandwich) or 'soup' (instead of chicken noodle soup) to keep it accessible for the Novice proficiency level. Don't miss our Sandwich Printable Props Pack for this activity! NEED PLAY FOOD FOR YOUR CLASS? Look no further! We have an ever growing set of play food in Spanish, as well as the same set unlabeled, as well as sets in German, French, Russian, and English! Visit our shop and grab it now- click here!
One of my favorite reasons for using webquests is to have students discover information on their own. I can take a step back and provide any necessary help, but the students are the ones doing all …
You are probably familiar with Kahoot as a review game, but my favorite way to use this website is a BLIND Kahoot. The game structure is the same only instead of reviewing a concept, you use it to introduce it! Check this out as a way to mix up your lesson plans, introduce content, and engage your students!
An easy gluten-free dish featuring tomatoes, seasonings, and cheddar cheese, baked up until melted and bubbly.
These easy Spanish cookies are a welcome switch from chocolate chip! Try one of these traditional recipes for a batch of cookies straight out of Spain!
These 6 short clips are great to include in your daily routine unit for a clip chat or movie talk in Spanish class!
Australian Gourmet Traveller Spanish dessert recipe for tarta de queso (Cheesecake) by Frank Camorra from Melbourne restaurant MoVida.
There are some activities that, as a teacher, I look forward to every year. Here are some of my favorite lesson plans for my Spanish class that I’m sure you will enjoy and your students will …
{Affiliate links used.} One of my favorite parts of teaching Spanish is reading real literature (not just stories written for language learners) with my students. Recently, I started reading literature with my high school son. I was amazed at how much he enjoyed the stories and how much more engaged he was than when working on grammar or vocabulary. Here are some of my favorite literature pieces to teach. I have used these selections time and again for about twenty years. Most of these stories would be upper level high school or intermediate college level Spanish. These first two selections are normally what I start out with if students have never read Spanish literature before. (NOTE: Many, but not all, of these selections can be found in Album.) Signos de Puntuacion by Luis C. Infante - The story of how Sr. Alvarez's last will and testament gets interpreted. His will is written without punctuation. Each of his relatives or acquaintances punctuate his will to benefit themselves. Humorous. Great starter story because the bulk of the story is repeated (the will portion). Una Carta a Dios by Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes - The humorous story of what happens when a Mexican farmer has complete faith in God and writes Him a letter. There are a lot of resources on the internet to supplement teaching this story as it is incredibly popular with Spanish teachers. No Oyes Ladrar Los Perros by Juan Rulfo - A man tries to save his wayward son after he has been injured. Poignant and sad. El Tiempo Borra by Javier de Viana - A short story from Uruguay about a gaucho who was imprisioned for 15 years. He is released. What will he find when he returns to his wife and child? Continuidad de Los Parques by Julio Cortazar - A man reading a novel becomes a part of the story. As with many of Cortazar's stories the line between reality and fantasy are blurred. La Nocha Boca Arriba by Julio Cortazar - Another great story with a surprise ending. Two realities are presented: a human sacrifice and a motorcycle accident. The level of reading on this one is a little more advanced. I would save Julio Cortazar's work after students have had some experience in reading in Spanish. Other titles by Cortazar: Casa Tomada, Axolotl. Un dia de estos by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - While I am really not a fan of Garcia Marquez's longer works (i.e. One Hundred Years of Solitude). This short story of a dentist and a mayor is worth the read. La Pared by Vicente Blasco Ibanez - A touching story of two families in Spain that overcome a feud when a fire breaks out in one of their homes. How tragedy can bring together enemies. El Crimen Perfecto by Enrique Anderson Imbert - A story from an Argentine author about a man who believes that he has committed the perfect crime. Very humorous with a touch of fantasy. Horacio Quiroga's short stories, A La Deriva and Las Medias de los Flamencos will give your students a taste of "The Poe of Latin America". Las Medias de los Flamencos is a more lighthearted story whereas A La Deriva is similar to some of the stories Edgar Allan Poe wrote. Teachers pay Teachers has a unit on Las Medias. Here is my packet on A La Deriva. A La Deriva Por Horacio Quiroga (Map, Vocab, Questions)
The Spanish flap R and the trilled RR are some of the most difficult sounds to produce in Spanish. Here is how I teach them
These are my favorite books for parents looking for Spanish/English bilingual stories for their children. These are perfect for non-native Spanish speakers.
These 7 School Themed Shorts for Movie Talks are great to include in your school unit for a clip chat or movie talk in Spanish class!
These 6 short clips are great to include in your daily routine unit for a clip chat or movie talk in Spanish class!
Here are some of my favorite reflexive verbs in Spanish practice - puzzles, games, speaking, and listening - for Spanish class!
