Speak More Spanish Blog — Speak More Spanish

Every Spanish teacher needs some easy prep, FREE Spanish games they can use in the language classroom. Read our blog post and download our free digital categories game for the language classroom below on our teachers pay teachers store (download button below).

**Playing games in the Spanish classroom is a great way to make learning languages fun!**

When you need a little extra fun to support a grammar, vocabulary or cultural lesson plan, add in a game to ramp up the Spanish fun. In games, students feel free to make mistakes, have fun, and learn! It’s a great no-pressure way to achieve your curricular goals and increase student participation.

Students love playing games in Spanish class! Even your most reluctant speakers will suddenly be searching through words lists, categorizing vocabulary and speaking Spanish to win a game. When you use games right, you sneak in a whole bunch of comprehensible input, grammar review, verb conjugations and authentic culture. The best thing about it is that your students are learning without realizing they are working hard…to win…and to learn!

I love coming up with ways to tweak current games to work in a language classroom. You may like our blog post how to use Battleship(tm) like search and find games for the language classroom. I also put a fun little twist on the Classic Mexican Game of La Lotería which you can read about here too! Both of these games are great for scaffolding. They help students with listening comprehension and provide opportunities to speak Spanish in low stress situations.

**We made our Lotería Game into a digital format so we could keep playing this great game during distance learning!**

Categories is one of our favorite, go-to games for the language classroom! It's easy to set up, super fun, and you can adjust it to work for any language level. You can play scategories for free just by setting up teams, drawing a game board on the white board in the front of the classroom and making up categories. Or download our digital template below with included printable PDFS to play in a different format.

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This year has been hard for teachers everywhere and we enter the classroom again, we all want to use the activities we know and love. Unable to group students together physically to play categories, I came up with this fun digital template that lets them play in virtual groups. I also found this works great for distance learning! Bonus!

I added in some creative writing activities you can use for after the game. Challenge students to use the words they came up with during the game to create a Spanish short story! Then, share that with the class or have them turn it in on Google Classroom(tm).

Here are the rules for categories:

1. Choose a letter for the category. For example, letter P.

2. Each team has to write ONE word that begins with P for the category. See the example below.

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3. Students can not repeat words in a category. For example, they can't write perro (for school - maybe it's their mascot) and perro(for animals).

4. Students can't use words in the titles of the categories.

5. When a team has completed all categories, that team says STOP (in whatever language your are using!). The other teams stop working at that point. If they didn't get to a category, they leave it blank.

6. Scoring: If a team is the only team with specific word, they get 2 points. If another team has the same word, they each get one point. For example. Team A has perro, Team B has perro also, but Team C has pato. Team A and B get one point, Team C gets two points.

7. After you go through the answers, choose a new letter and play another round.

8. For each round, you can choose to change the categories or keep them the same. For example, maybe your category COMIDA becomes COMIDA CALIENTE. Or your category “Spanish AR verbs" in the present tense yo form”, changes to the ellos form. Experiment with what works best for your class!

9. Using the target language: Use as much comprehensible input as you can when going over answers. Ask students to justify their answers. For example, if a team writes amigos for SCHOOL, ask them to explain why that works. Students will try really hard to get their points!

10. Some category suggestions: Verbs (any tense, any person), adjectives, any theme related to a book you are reading in class or a unit you are studying, animals, food, sports, school, countries, etc.

I made this digital template of the Categories Game so you can still play in class, even if you have to do distance learning, or maintain distance between students in the classroom. We’ve also been hard at work at making other great digital resources! Click the picture to see them in our store!

And then don’t forget to download your free version of the Digital Categories below! Tell your language colleagues too…This template works for any language. Do your French, German and Chinese Language Teacher colleagues to grab their free copy in our store!