How to Teach the Spanish-Speaking Countries

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Let’s talk about how to include geography in your classes! I’m not sure if you’ve ever experienced this, but it totally drives me crazy when students have no sense of where things are in the world. I try to weave in geography skills throughout curriculum to prevent those moments. Here are several ideas for how to teach the Spanish-speaking countries!

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How to Teach the Spanish-Speaking Countries

Learn the Spanish-Speaking Countries

The first step is just getting students to know the names of the countries and hearing them. Sometimes they don’t even know WHAT is a country! So let’s look at countries and flags – introduce the countries and their flags while you are working on colors with your students. You can do one country a day, or do a whole bunch in one lesson!

Spanish-Speaking Countries’ Flags

You can also hang up a classroom display with all the flags – either ones your students have colored, or print colorful ones and hang them up! When you mention a country, you can point and pause to its flag to help connect that symbol. If you have a big map in your classroom, point to the location as well!

Spanish-Speaking Countries Map Printable

In the first quarter of the year, I like to do some direct practice learning where they are located with maps & activities. This map of countries that speak Spanish pdf comes with several pages of activities! It includes:

  • labeling the countries that speak Spanish on the map
  • regions of the world and placing the Spanish-speaking countries within them
  • fill in the blank of the capitals
  • answer keys

All of the pages are included with the countries’ names in Spanish or English, and there are variations with and without the United States as a Spanish-speaking country. This is great if you want to teach about the countries that speak Spanish IN Spanish. Choose which variations are best for your classes!

Daily Routines

As we start getting into classroom routines, one of my favorite weekly routines is Música Miércoles. I use the routine from Mis Clases Locas, but I add a slide before the song to introduce the artists and what country they are from. Some days we circle this a little bit, some days I pull up a map to make sure we’re all clear on WHERE the country is, and some days we go over it and move on.

Virtual Field Trips through Spanish-Speaking Countries

These are such a go to for me. I use ‘em at the start of the unit, at the end of a unit, for cultural celebrations, even sub plans! They are SO good for geography skills because students are navigating a map while they do it. Some teachers have mentioned that they use them weekly as part of their lessons, too! If you’d like to learn more about virtual field trips and grab a free trip to try out in your classroom, make sure to check out this post here.

Books Set in Spanish-Speaking Countries

Of COURSE we couldn’t talk about this without discussing readers set in Spanish-speaking countries. There are a ton of them, but this is a great way to help your students learn about Spanish-speaking countries. Check out my blog post here where I listed as many readers as I could for each country!

How to Teach the Spanish-Speaking Countries

I know there are a LOT more ways we can talk about countries around the world, especially when we’re thinking about sharing culture with students, but I’m going to stop here because I really wanted to try to keep this focused on the geography piece. If you’d like more ideas for what you can do in a culture class, make sure you check out my blog post here.

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Ashley Mikkelsen

Hi, I'm Ashley. I'm so glad you're here! I love helping secondary Spanish teachers with engaging activities and ideas for their lesson plans. I can't wait to support you with no and low prep activities to help reduce your workload!

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