Here is another idea brought to you by the seductively fun Deb Abshier.
She brought a version of this activity to share with our class on Wednesday night, and I love it! The possibilities are endless, but it is very important that you set it up correctly.
(MAKE SURE YOU CLICK HERE TO READ THIS POST TOO IN ORDER TO MAKE THE ACTIVITY GO MUCH MORE SMOOTHLY!!!--way better than how I originally did it as laid out below)
- Write out seventeen sentences, or questions/answer combinations, or trivia (ex: capital cities and countries), or subjects/conjugated verbs, etc.
- Split each of your seventeen sentences into two parts. If you want to guarantee that there is only ONE correct "answer" to the puzzle, make sure that you write sentences and split them at places that limit students' options: "toca" (plays) ONLY matches "la guitarra" (the guitar) on this puzzle. If I had split it after "Mi hermano" (my brother), the sentence could be correctly completed with any third-person verb form. (The second page of the document has subject/verb splits, and there are probably multiple correct arrangements of the puzzle, although I'm not sure).
- Place the two corresponding word chunks across from each other on all of the inside edges of the puzzle. For example, note the placement of "Mi hermano toca/la guitarra" in the upper-right corner of this image.
- Fill in the outside edges of the puzzle by copying some of the sentence parts from the inside of the puzzle in order to make it more complicated: students will have to match up ALL FOUR sides of the square instead of just finding one side that matches and assuming that the other three are correct.
- Copy the document and distribute to students (individuals, pairs, or groups...you decide)
- REQUIRE THAT STUDENTS CUT OUT EACH INDIVIDUAL SQUARE...even though this will take forever. It would probably be worth your time to cut them yourself using a paper cutter; just make sure you have a strategy for sorting the cut-out squares into sets. THIS STEP IS VERY IMPORTANT because if students just cut between the lines once, they can simply match up the cut edges instead of the text. EACH LINE MUST BE CUT SEPARATELY. This definitely makes this a more time-consuming activity than it should be. A good solution would be to make a class set that you cut out and laminate and use over and over and over.
- Have students put the puzzle back together.
In the document, I included three different ways that you could use the activity:
- Facts from a story--I used "El lobo hambriento" and split up different events (Ex: The wolf is sad/and cries, The girl steals/the wolf's food)
- Subject/verb pairs (Ex: Nosotros/comemos) using three -er verbs in the present tense
- Sentences in the present tense (Ex: My brother/plays the guitar)
The fourth page is blank. Download an editable version here.
