Practice Preterite Verbs Conjugations With an Interactive Exercise for the Entire Class: Great Spanish Activity for High School

Practice Preterite Verbs Conjugations With an Interactive Exercise for the Entire Class: Great Spanish Activity for High School
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Interactive Activity for Practicing Spanish Questions & Answers

Your Spanish class will most likely be composed of students who learn at different rates. Activities that get everyone working together will help your weaker students learn from the more advanced ones. Many students have trouble with the preterit tense. The following activity involves students walking around the classroom asking questions in Spanish using a verb in the preterit and looking for the correct answers.

Process

First get a pack of index cards. On the first twenty cards write questions that have to do with the grammar and vocabulary you are covering that week. Since your class is learning preterit verb endings you come up with twenty questions that use this tense. Since you want your students working on the nouns and adjectives for the chapter too, include these in the questions or answers. On the next twenty cards write an appropriate response to each question.

Now explain to the class that each student is going to receive an index card. The card will either have a question or an answer on it. Each student’s job is to find the person who has the correct answer to their question or the correct question to their answer. Pass out enough cards so that half the class gets a question and the other half gets an answer. If you have an uneven amount of students give one student two cards and tell him that he needs to find two people.

Let’s Go!

After passing out the cards explain that nobody is to move until you give the signal. When a person finds his match both students are to walk to the front of the room and wait. Once all student have found their match and are at the front of the room each group will read their question and answer and the class as a whole can decide if they are a match. Once each group has been checked for accuracy collect the cards, mix them up and pass them out again. My experience has been that about three or four rounds of this game work well. After the novelty wears off some students will get a little unruly!

This activity will work for Spanish classes from middle school to high school. If you are an energetic college instructor I think it could even work in your lower level Spanish classes. Students may not admit it, but when they are up and moving around they are more alert and are learning and retaining more.