Unscramble Scrambled Sentences in Spanish Activity

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If you’re looking for a fun activity for your lesson plans, try out this word scramble game! Students put the Spanish words in the correct order to create a sentence, then record the complete sentences on their practice sheets. Check out how to use these Spanish unscramble sentences in your middle school and high school classes!

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Why Use Scrambled Sentences?

With so many fun educational games to choose from, why hand students a group of words and let them at ’em? This is a great way for your students to get a handle on sentence structure in a way that’s much more hands on than a grammar worksheet. With a scrambled sentence activity, students can think about the language they’ve seen, heard, and read in class and start putting together patterns.

This is great to use after a ton of input in your unit to let students do some hands on word work!

When to Use Spanish Unscramble Sentences Activities?

Scrambled sentences can be great for independent work and stations or centers. I like to use them as one of four stations in the room, and let students use it for the reading station!

Learn more about using stations in your Spanish classroom here!

As much as I love stations, my favorite time to use them is as a whole class review day. I’ll split up the entire class into pairs, and have a group of three if we have an odd number of students in the class. I usually seat students in small groups and they often work in pairs with their shoulder partner or face partner, so it is easy to split them up and have them work in scrambled sentence pairs.

Learn more about seating chart arrangements here!

How to Prep

To create a scrambled sentence activity, I like to come up with sentences that fit the unit, topic, or structures we are focusing on. I’ll write about 10 sentences, using the verbs, grammar tenses, and vocabulary we need to reinforce. Depending on how much leeway I have in my prep time, and if I have a study hall with helpful students that year or not, I’ll put one sentence per sheet of paper and cut up the separate words or pass them to a student to help!

I personally like to make 2 sets of the 10 sentences to use in a class of 25-30 students so they don’t wind up sitting and waiting for the next set of words while they’re working! I will usually do this on two different colors to help keep the sets straight in case someone drops a piece on the floor.

How to Play

To use this activity in classes, I split up students into pairs and give them a student handout or just have them take out a blank sheet of paper and number it 1-10, double space between each one. As they play, one partner will grab a packet of words and then work together to put them in order. When they think they have it in order, they raise their hands and I come by and check. I either give them the okay, or I give them some feedback and let them know they need to keep working on it!

When they have the sentence unscrambled, and have received the okay, they’ll write down the Spanish sentence and the English translation. It’s a great way to check for comprehension in case there’s a new word mixed in with the sentence or an older word they haven’t seen for awhile!

Then, they scramble the pieces back up, bring the packet back up, and grab a new bunch of words to keep working!

Digital Version

Above is a digital version of a Spanish unscramble sentences activity on Google Slides from one of my high frequency verbs units.

If you would like to do a scrambled sentence activity digitally, you can! I like to use Google Slides or Boom Cards to make this a digital activity. Some like to use a text box for each word, but I prefer to create an image for each word to make it easier for the students to “grab” the word and drag it into order. Otherwise sometimes students grab the text box and wind up deleting a word or changing it instead of moving it like they need to.

Check out the image below for an example of what a scrambled sentence looks like on Boom Cards from a Cinco de Mayo activity!