Communicative Spanish Tasks

Unit description: This unit has everything you need to present the Spanish preterite via 8 lesson plans for 50-minute class sessions. The unit moves from input (students decide who is at fault in a Reddit AITA post) to communicative output (guessing the title of a movie from plot descriptions prepared by their classmates), emphasizing small-group conversational and written activities throughout. The unit concludes with 3 different assessments: 1 oral, 1 written, and 1 project (“Cook a traditiona

Bundle description: This bundle has everything you need to teach your students the Spanish preterite and imperfect from the ground up. The 25 lesson plans for 50-minute class sessions (5-6 weeks depending on how many days you have class) cover three units: one introducing the preterite, one introducing the imperfect, and one teaching how to use both in conjunction. Each unit moves from input to communicative output, emphasizing small-group conversational and written activities throughout. By the

Unit description: This unit has everything you need to contrast the Spanish preterite and imperfect via 10 lesson plans for 50-minute class sessions. The unit moves from input (students solve a murder mystery inspired by the video game Among Us) to communicative output (interrogating suspects’ alibi after a heist), emphasizing small-group conversational and written activities throughout. The unit concludes with 3 different assessments: 1 oral, 1 written, and 1 project (“Present a cultural topic

Lesson description: Based on the popular video game Among Us, this task-based, 50-minute lesson has students solve a classic whodunnit murder mystery aboard a spaceship. Students complete a gallery walk, reading 6 different stories which chronicle the movement of astronauts throughout the night and using record-keeping materials designed to help them solve the mystery through close attention to the preterite and imperfect. At the end of the class, students vote which astronaut to throw out the

Unit description: This unit has everything you need to present the Spanish imperfect via 7 lesson plans for 50-minute class sessions. The unit moves from input (students learn about the childhood of famous Latina actress Jenna Ortega) to communicative output (interviewing their instructor about how life was different when they were little), emphasizing small-group conversational and written activities throughout. The unit concludes with 3 different assessments: 1 oral, 1 written, and 1 project (

It can be tough to find entertaining ways to have students produce the subjunctive and commands in an organic way! This resource bundle includes 4 50-minute lesson plans that will make your class buzz with excitement--my students regularly comment on these in my course evaluations, months after doing them! This resource bundle includes: El doctor del amor: Students take the role of Good and Evil Love Doctors giving advice for a date using value judgments ("Es necesario que...") and indirect comm

Lesson description: This 50- to 75-minute communicative task asks students to work with a partner to select a real-life travel destination in accordance with their preferences. Suitable for both face-to-face or online environments (with optional materials provided for Canvas integration), the lesson practices vocabulary associated with travel, weather, and ordinal numbers through numerous conversational activities requiring the negotiation of meaning. Moreover, students are exposed to a wide var

Lesson description: This mini-lesson provides a task-based, communicative opportunity to practice numbers greater than 100. Students participate in an auction of absurd items sold on eBay whose true value is unknown. In small groups, students take turns auctioning off the items and buying them from a small pool of cash. At the end of the activity, students discover the true monetary value of the auctioned items, and whoever was the savviest buyer wins. Two short scaffolding activities are includ

Lesson description: This 50+ minute lesson allows students to practice food vocabulary by replicating the restaurant experience at every step. Students will first take the role of waiters and customers by placing and receiving orders from a menu of traditional Spanish dishes. Next, students become chefs, assembling the dishes from the first step in a timed activity replicating the popular cooperative cooking simulation game Overcooked!. Finally, students finish as food critics, checking to see

Lesson description: Inspired by an episode of the podcast Radiolab ( linked here), this communicative, task-based lesson practices medical vocabulary and indirect commands in the subjunctive mood by asking students to explore the ethical dilemmas of triage. In the activity, students take the role of doctors tasked with triaging a group of patients. Students will debate the classification of patients in small groups before justifying their decisions to the class. Objectives of the lesson: · Prac

Are you looking for games and tasks to practice Spanish vocabulary in meaningful situations? This bundle contains 5 50-minute lesson plans covering clothing, colors, body parts, food, travel, sports, and medical vocabulary: Regatear en un mercado: Turn your classroom into an open-air market where students haggle to buy and sell clothes.El triage: Inspired by an episode of the podcast Radiolab (linked here), this activity has students explore the ethical dilemmas of triage by taking the role of d

Lesson description: This communicative, task-based lesson gives students the opportunity to practice past tenses (preterite and imperfect) in Spanish. In it, a small group of students will be accused as suspects of a crime. They will then come up with an alibi, while the remaining students will form police squads who will interrogate each suspect individually, hoping to ask specific questions about their alibi which will elicit conflicting responses from each suspect. If the suspects can maintai

Lesson description: Adapted from the bomb defusal video game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, this communicative, task-based, 50-minute lesson practices commands (formal or informal). Students take the role of Defusers—who can see the bomb but don’t know how to defuse it—and Experts, who have the defusal instructions but can’t see the bomb. With the clock ticking, they’ll have to work fast to defuse the bomb before it explodes! Materials are provided to complete the activity either F2F (face-t

Lesson description: This 50-minute online lesson has students practice basic classroom vocabulary by playing Pictionary and Charades in a fully-virtual environment using the websites skribbl.io and playingcards.io. Not only do these games provide an entertaining way to practice the target vocabulary, specific attention is drawn to the importance of drawing and gesture in overcoming gaps in linguistic knowledge. Although this lesson plan could be carried out in a face-to-face setting via more tra

Lesson description: This lesson practices time-telling structures and negotiation of meaning through a real-life communicative task central to travel in a foreign country: booking an itinerary on public transportation. Students take one of two roles: tourists who wish to travel from one Spanish city to another, and travel agents who use authentic plane, train, and bus websites in the target language to help them book an itinerary which suits their needs. Appropriate even for learners who have on

Lesson description: This lesson will let you kill two birds with one stone: review body parts vocabulary and learn Spanish figures of speech. Linguistic studies have shown that the instruction of idiomatic language can be used as an effective method to teach grammar (see Marqués-Pascual & DuBois 2015, Ser y estar son pan comido: La enseñanza de la gramática mediante expresiones idiomáticas). This lesson extends these findings to the realm of vocabulary instruction, as students make educated g

This product includes 27 prompts over 8 themes for Beginning to Intermediate Spanish students, as well as tips on what format to use for oral assessments and how to prepare students. It also includes a rubric for evaluation. The themes covered are: Family vocabularyTimes and calendarsGetting to know your partnerCommunicative competenceDebate to order according to importanceAdviceVacationsThe pastThe prompts are ~5 minute communicative tasks designed for Interpersonal rather than Presentational s

Lesson description: This lesson provides an entertaining yet carefully controlled way to practice the subjunctive in value judgments ( es necesario que…) and indirect commands ( recomiendo que…). In it, students are assigned the task of helping out a caricatured Ryan Gosling in his tumultuous love life. They take the role of ‘love doctors’ giving advice to the poor celebrity—but not all doctors attended the same medical school! Students are divided into Good and Evil Love Doctors, giving the adv

Lesson description: This lesson, adaptable to both face-to-face and remote environments, is a task-based activity which requires students to use authentic target language websites to find an apartment to rent in Spain. To complete this task, students will need to use possessive adjectives, comparatives, and superlatives. The activity is structured around collaborative writing in GoogleDocs, which means the instructor can keep a close eye on their responses whether the activity is performed in pe

Lesson description: This 50-minute lesson brings the fun of card games to the online classroom in order to let students practice Spanish numbers communicatively through playing BS and Go Fish. At the heart of this lesson is the free, easy-to-use, and highly customizable virtual tabletop website playingcards.io, where small groups of students in breakout rooms can interact virtually the same way they would over a card table in a face-to-face environment. Although you could carry out this lesson p