Get your students excited for the new school year while reviewing or introducing essential concepts with interactive Spanish games! The following ideas can be easily adapted to your students’ proficiency level and age, which makes them challenging, yet still achievable—and most of all, fun!
- Scavenger Hunt Bingo
Combine two fan favorites into one entertaining game! Prepare bingo boards that contain squares with descriptions in Spanish, such as camina a la escuela or tiene dos hermanos, and give one card to each student. Students then walk around the classroom with their cards, asking one classmate at a time if a particular description applies to them. If it does, then the student asking will initial that square on their card. The first student to have five initialed squares in a row can call out “BINGO!” and win the game.
- Simón Dice
Get students on their feet while reviewing commands and the vocabulary for parts of the body with a game of Spanish “Simon Says”—Simón Dice. To liven things up, have students take turns being Simón. You can even change the rules, and have players ignore the commands Simón gives and only move when the leader doesn’t say “Simón dice…”.
- Storytelling
This activity works great with higher levels, but could also be done bilingually with novice learners. You begin a story in the target language and then each student simply adds onto it. Don’t worry whether the story makes sense; the crazier, the better—and the more entertaining—the story will be! If you want to review vocabulary around a certain theme or grammar concept, you can brainstorm ideas for the story ahead of time as a class.
- Word Chain
For this game, have students sit in a circle. Next, select the category students must use (e.g., food, family, clothing). The first person says a word (in Spanish) from the category, and the next student must say a Spanish word that begins with the last letter of the previous word. If they can’t think of a word, students can “llamar a un(a) amigo(a)”—“call” a friend who’s in the class—to help them out. The game continues until no one can think of another word, at which point, another category is chosen.
- Sentence Building Relay
Spilt the class into teams of four or five students to play a grammar relay race. Give each member of the team a note card that contains one word from a sentence in Spanish (subject, verb, adjective, etc.). Students then race to be the first team to put the sentence in the correct order. This game is perfect for reviewing the placement of adjectives and object pronouns!
By Kelli Drummer-Avendano
Also read:
4 Fun Ideas to Get Students Ready for Back-to-School
Ice-breakers, Warm-Up Activities, and Other Ways to Engage Your Class
