Hands On Activities for Spanish Class

Are you SICK of screens? I know some days it feels like we’re just pulling their eyeballs away from phones and laptops. I wanted to share a few of my favorite hands on activities for Spanish class!

Just a note before I get into things – these are my favorite hands on activities that can be done seated at a desk or in a smaller space. They are not activities that focus on getting students up and moving around the room, although there is a little bit of rearranging that might happen. If you’d like to see ideas for activities that get students up and moving around, check out my blog post here on 6 Ways to Include Movement in Spanish Class.

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7 Hands On Activities for Spanish Class

1. Grid Puzzles
2. Tabata Timeline
3. Scrambled Sentences
4. Trash or Treasure (True/False)
5. Marker Game
6. Partner Matamoscas
7. Mini Corre en Círculos

Grid Puzzles

Grid Puzzles can be set up in a few ways. You can have students practice with translations, matching Spanish to images, reviewing structures within sentences, story sequencing, and completing questions and answers. In a grid puzzle, students match up the edges of the squares together until they complete the grid!

You can have students complete these individually or with a partner, and they’re a great option for stations.

Want to get started using these puzzles in your classroom? Click here to check out my editable templates!

Tabata Timeline

Tabata Timeline is one of my favorite re-reading activities. It’s fast-paced, due to the timer. Students write events that happen in a story, then cut them apart. Then, they take turns using other students’ events to put them on a timeline from the beginning to the end of the story. Plus, you can make it more challenging by changing the language, or having them add some things that didn’t happen in the story! Learn more about this activity in the blog post here.

Scrambled Sentences

Scrambled sentences are a great way to get your students thinking and talking about the language collaboratively! Groups or partners work together to reassembled the scrambled sentence while working on the targeted structures. Click here to check out my pre-made scrambled sentences sets!

Trash or Treasure (True/False)

Getting your students to sort statements as “trash or treasure” is a great option for a hands on activity and there’s several ways you can mix it up:

• For vocab, use the vocab word in a sentence and if it is used correctly it’s “treasure” and if it’s incorrectly used it is “trash”.
• For conjugation, write sentences using the verbs you want your students to practice and have them determine if it’s conjugated correctly.
• With a story, sorting events that did or did not happen.

You can make this lower prep by having your students create the statements. Just don’t forget to have them mark trash or treasure before they hand it in so you’re not guessing!

Marker Game from Cynthia Hitz

While this is called the marker game, you can really play it with anything students to race to grab. Some people like to play with little stuffed animals! Pair students up and place the marker between them. You read a statement. If it is true, students race to grab the marker & hold up. If it’s false, they don’t touch it. You can have them play for points, or not – up to you!

Partner Matamoscas

Partner Matamoscas is a way to take the beloved Flyswatter Game and increase engagement by letting everyone play at once!

Above you can see a simple example from my Cognates Games and Activities resource! Put one game board between two students and call out a word in either Spanish (for the English board) or English (for the Spanish board). Students then race to be the first to touch the corresponding word. You can have them touch it with their fingers, or you can give students a colored marker and let them strike through the word with their color. Check out how to score the game and more options for language use in the blog post here!

Mini Corre en Círculos

You know I LOVE Corre en Círculos for getting students up and moving, but sometimes a class can’t handle the usual scavenger hunt style review game – or you just played it last week, and want to put a twist on it! Mini Corre en Círculos is great to have on hand for fast finishers, OR even as another option for stations!

Several of my sets have multiple versions for differentiation. What I’ll often do (and what actually happened in the picture above) is students will complete one version from the walls in the traditional activity set up. Then, they’ll grab a puzzle version of the next option and work on that.

Not sure how to make PDFs print multiple pages to a sheet? Check out this handy tutorial on YouTube!

Click here to learn more about how to play Corre en Círculos and 10 ways you can use the activity cards in your classroom!

Favorite Hands On Activities for Spanish Class

These are my favorite hands on activities for Spanish class. I think they’re great to use when you want to put away the screens and let students focus on the language on the paper in front of them!

What are your favorite hands on activities to use with your classes? I’d love to hear! Drop a comment below on this post to share!

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Looking for more?

• 27 Activities for Stations in Spanish Class
• Listening Activities for Spanish Class
• Speaking Activities for Spanish Class