Hands On Activities for Spanish Class
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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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Why Hands On Activities for Spanish Class Just Work
Okay, let’s be real – some days, the screens just need a break. You can see it in their eyes. They’re glazed over from too many tabs, too many logins, too many digital assignments. That’s when I love pulling out some hands on activities for Spanish class. It’s like a breath of fresh air, for them and for me.
These types of activities get students physically involved, whether they’re matching phrases, building timelines, or piecing together scrambled sentences. There’s something about touching the language, literally that helps it stick. Bonus points: it gets them talking, moving, and way more invested than just clicking through another review game.
7 Hands On Activities for Spanish Class
- Grid Puzzles
- Tabata Timeline
- Scrambled Sentences
- Trash or Treasure (True/False)
- Marker Game
- Partner Matamoscas
- 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!
Easy Wins with Paper, Scissors, and Spanish
You don’t need fancy supplies. Just paper, a timer, and a little bit of prep can turn an average Tuesday into one of your most productive days. My personal favorite? Grid puzzles. They’re satisfying to complete and sneak in a ton of vocab practice.
Another go-to: Trash or Treasure. Kids get way too into deciding whether a sentence is correct or ridiculous. Add some laughter, a little competition, and suddenly they’re begging to play again. That’s what I call a win.
If you’re teaching multiple levels, these hands on activities for Spanish class make differentiation so simple. You can tweak the questions or prompts based on what each group needs — no reinventing the wheel every time.
So if your students (or you!) are feeling screen fatigue, give one of these a try. You’ll be surprised how much Spanish they remember when their hands and brains are busy.
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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