Looking to keep things fresh and new without driving yourself crazy with planning and prep?
Want to incorporate listening, speaking, reading, AND writing activities all in one class period, but aren't sure how?
You're in the right place!
These 7 Spanish activities (for secondary classrooms!) are guaranteed to 🚀 skyrocket student engagement and keep your lesson plans varied - without spending hours on prep!
Why include listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities?
1️⃣ The variety of activities will help students who all learn in different ways.
2️⃣ It's helpful for students to practice their knowledge in a variety of ways.
How to include all 4 activities in one 50-minute class period?
Okay let's imagine you have a class period from 8:00-8:50am.
8:00-8:05am bell work (5 mins)
8:05-8:20am teach new material (15 mins)
8:20-8:45am classwork (25 mins)
8:45-8:50am exit ticket (5 mins)
Every lesson is going to vary - sometimes it'll take longer or shorter than 15 minutes to teach that day's vocab or grammar.
But assuming you have approximately 25 minutes for classwork... If you spend 5-10 minutes on each classwork activity, then you will be able to have students complete 3-5 activities total. That could include listening, and speaking, and reading, and writing.
Again, it definitely doesn't always work out that way. But over the week, students should get a variety of practice with those 4 types of activities.
7 engaging Spanish activities
These are my go-to activities for middle and high school students. They could work at other levels too, but might need some tweaking to fit your students.
Listening
Choose the item you hear
Students listen to a statement or description and choose the image being described or talked about.
All you need is clipart images of current vocab or grammar that students will recognize!
Speaking
Partner
Students take turns asking and answering questions (with question and answer prompts) with a partner.
They get to practice recent vocab and/or grammar. Plus the prompts take the mental load off - they don't have to think about what they had for lunch and how to say that in Spanish... they have prompts in front of them.
I have a blog post with step-by-step directions on how to create a partner speaking activity (called an info-gap activity in this post).
Whole-class
Students get up out of their seats and ask someone a pre-determined question. They either have a prompted response or you can let them choose one of the 9 or 12 possible responses. They have to find at least 1 person with each response before they return to their seats.
This is a great activity when you can have students repeat one question with a bunch of different answer options.
I have a blog post with step-by-step directions on how to create a whole-class speaking activity.
Reading
Answer questions
Students read a paragraph and answer questions.
The paragraph is conveniently littered with current vocabulary words and grammar constructions. 😏
The paragraph can be only words, or it can include images for the vocab words, just like the example below. 👇
Fill in the blanks
Students read a paragraph or conversation and fill in blanks with words from a word bank.
Again, the paragraph or conversation is full of current vocabulary words and it's not a coincidence. 😂
Writing
Answer questions
Students answer questions with picture prompts for the answers.
This activity can be repetitive (and I don't recommend using it every day), but it will get students some quick practice with current vocab and grammar.
Describe a picture
Students are given pictures that they have to describe or state what is happening.
This activity lets students get a little creative!
I like to use pexels.com and pixabay.com to find images. Both are completely free.
Pro tip
Have AI help you write the paragraph or questions for the reading or writing activity. Tell it exactly what words and grammar constructions to use and then tweak it from there.
What are your go-to activities? Please share in the comments!
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