Spanish+Games

Geography Games This link will lead you to a big range of geography quizzes!

$10,000 pyramid
This is a simple but fun game. It has two objectives. The first is to reinforce or remind students of specific vocabulary, and the second is to get students working on descriptive sentences, synonym recall, and category speech.

First, develop categories that you want to teach. For my game today I had six categories: la casa, la escuela, la familia, each worth $50 per word; cosas que hago durante la mañana, cosas que hago durante el día, and palabras sobre otras palabras, each worth $100 per word. I taped each word list, in English and in Spanish, on the board face down, clumped into groups of same score words.

There are two teams of players. Each team decides on a person to be the Describer, and the rest of the team members are the Guessers. Group One Describer goes up, chooses a category, and picks that list of words off the board. Without saying the word, he has to describe it until someone in the group gets it. When either 3 minutes elapse, or the whole list is done, Group Two Describer comes up and chooses a category. The next round, a Guesser becomes the Describer, and you run two more rounds. We got in three rounds each, in 20 minutes or so.

Banana Split infinitives
This game was really hard, and took longer than I thought. It helps students think of the component parts of the words they know, but it also aids in rapid recall and reinforcement of common vocab. Divide the class into two teams. I had made a list of one hundred verbs, and cut them all in half at one of the syllable endings. I tried to make it so that all the endings were not -ar, -er, or -ir, but all sorts of different lengths and combinations. Here's a sample: Ab rir Almor zar And ar Asis tir Be ber Be sar Bus car Then, I put the pile of the first parts of the words on one side, and the pile of word endings on the other side, all face up. When I said go, one representative from each group ran up, tried to match a beginning with an ending, and when they did, ran back and slapped the hand of the next person on their team. The team with the most words at the end of five minutes won.

Verb Charades
This is another game that gets students working on remembering vocabulary, doing synonym recognition, and direct recall of related words. It is much better for the guessers than it is for the actor!

I had a list of about 50 of the most common verbs. I printed them up in a large font, and cut each one out individually. I put them in a big box in the front of the room. I divided the students into two groups, and each one selected an actor. The actor went up to the box, chose a verb without looking, and then had to act out the verb while group members guessed what he was doing. Some were amazingly hard. I allowed drawing, acting, and dividing the word up into constituent parts.

In 20 minutes, we went through about 10 words, five for each team.

When the groups guessed the word, they got to keep it. Then at the end, the groups exchanged their verbs, and each group had one minute to make a paragraph using all the verbs from the other group. The group with the most interesting story with those words won.