Have you ever played the game “Spoons” at a party? This was one of my favorite games throughout high school and college. We played it backstage at all of our school plays, in the lunchroom, in our dorm rooms, in the evenings when I lived in Mexico, at holiday family gatherings…whenever we could! The games…
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BINGO! as a springboard to writing
This is my attempt at legitimizing a fun activity (BINGO) that doesn’t actually help students learn language. BINGO works well for review, as a P.A.T. option, or for a sub plan activity… but language acquisition? The value is about ZERO. Before you play BINGO There are three things that you’ll need to do before class…
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Rumors
Moving on from ‘fue‘, today we started working on ‘dijo’ (said). To begin, I had each of the students write an imaginary rumor in Spanish on a small piece of paper, and write their own name on the paper as well. I made sure that all students understand that the rumors were to be silly…
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La bolsa mágica
P.A.T. Games
Here are two great games to use for Preferred Activity Time that I found on the Spanish Playground blog: 1, 2, 3, Calabaza – Similar to “Red Light, Green Light”; A great game to play while the weather is still nice enough to go outside! If you are not a Spanish teacher, you could pick any…
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The Name Game, but not…
I’m sure that everyone has played this game as the ‘name game’ at some training that they’ve attended in the past. Everyone stands in a circle, and one person introduces him or herself. The next person introduces him or herself, then has to recite (from memory) the names of each of the people that have…
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Write, Draw, Pass extension
Why I didn’t think of this before, I’ll never know…but I realized this week while playing Write, Draw, Pass with my students that I can get lots of reps and stories out of what they’ve written–duh! I tell students to write simple, amusing, short sentences. This means that I end up with a lot of…
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Trading Up
This game will take you two days to play. It is designed to practice the structures “I/you have” and “is worth more than”. Day One – Explain rules and give out paperclips: Give each student a paper clip (or some other small, meaningless object). Tell them that their homework is to “Trade Up”. They need…
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Write, Draw, Pass
I first played Write, Draw, Pass at our Bible Study end of the year party, and it quickly became one of my favorite party games! At a recent PD class, my colleague Ashley VanHemert pointed out how perfect it is to use as the starting point for communicative input in language classes! Ashley first made…
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Salad Bowl communicative game
I learned how to play Salad Bowl from my sister back in college! It is super fun to play with friends, and it works well in the language classroom as a PAT game. But before we learn how to play… I’ve got two important cautions. This is NOT an input-based game. In fact, it’s a…
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