10 Free digital lesson ideas for Spanish language teachers that will get your students excited

¡Hola! Teachers worldwide know the struggle of getting students excited about the subject they teach. But the task can be made a lot easier if they actually have fun while learning. Not only will time fly by, they’ll also retain more information afterwards! BookWidgets will help you achieve that goal.

Below are 10 exercises for your Spanish class that will keep your students engaged in the subject. You can copy and use the widgets the way they are, but you can also take them as points of departure and adapt them to suit your own needs.

I suggest any language teacher to read this post as the didactics behind language lessons go for everyone. All these language lesson ideas will inspire you.

How to use these digital Spanish exercises?

All these digital lessons are created with BookWidgets.

Just click on the image of the exercises below to open them and make a copy in your own BookWidgets account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start one for free.

This way, you’ll be able to make some changes. When you share the exercises with your students, the results will also come back to you.

Pro tip: Now you can add even change the content, or translate the Spanish vocabulary or grammar rules to the language you teach.

Have fun!

Teaching vocabulary with a hotspot image

“Hooray, I get to learn new vocabulary!”, said no student ever. Hotspot Image widgets are a great way to turn the frown upside down when it comes to learning new words. Here are 2 creative ways to approach vocabulary sessions making use of the Hotspot widget.

1. Find and discover

Use a messy image (with a lot of disorganized objects on it) to create a fun “Where’s Waldo” style exercise. Tell your students in advance how many objects there are to be found, and challenge them to find them all!

2. Fruits and vegetables

Multi-sensory learning works. Replace a bland table-style vocabulary list with a multimedia hotspot image. Not only will your students be actively engaged in learning by point-and-clicking their way through the image, they’ll also connect image to sound, which will hard-code the information into their memories a lot better than your traditional vocab list.

Go check it out!

Learning and practicing with language games

The following exercises use game widgets. If you present the subject matter as a game, students might forget they’re actually being tested!

3. Pair matching– Sports

After you’ve given your students a vocabulary topic to learn, use the Pair Matching widget to see how much of it they remember. Because this one plays on the multi-sensory approach (better known as the dual coding learning technique) as well, connecting words to images, even if they get a few answers wrong initially, they’ll be sure to get everything right the next time around.

4. Bingo – Animals

The Bingo widget is excellent for organizing a group game in the classroom. The teacher reads words at random, and sees which student is the first to get a completed line. You can spice up your bingo game’s difficulty by just showing images rather than reading words, or better yet: read the words in English while your students mark the corresponding Spanish translations on their bingo cards!

5. Randomness – Sentence building

What’s more exciting than a little improv? With the reels of the Randomness widget, you can create fun speaking exercises that even you won’t know the exact outcome of. In this example, we’ll let students build easy sentences of the structure “Who does it – what do they do – where do they do it?”. En español, por supuesto. Motivate your students to come up with creative or witty, out-of-the box answers.

6. Crossword Puzzle – Parts of the house

Crossword puzzles are definitely a fun way to test your students’ knowledge. The exercise below simply provides the English word for different parts of the house, and students complete the grid with the Spanish translations. But for advanced students, why not replace the English source with a description in Spanish?

Learning and testing with quizzes and worksheets

These are BookWidgets’ classics. There’s so much you can do with these three widgets (Quiz, Worksheet & Split Worksheet) alone! Here are 4 more ways you can use BookWidgets for your language class.

7. Split Worksheet - Complete the lyrics

Music and song lyrics are a popular learning method for language learners both adult and adolescent. Incorporating the cultural element in your lessons will remind your students of the purpose of learning a language, and it keeps the spark alive. In this example, we’ve used a Split Worksheet to embed a music video, and paired it with a fill-in-the-blanks exercise for the song lyrics. Watch and learn! Literally. 😊

8. Annotate Picture - Parts of the house

Use the annotate picture question type of a Quiz or (Split) Worksheet to make your vocabulary tests a lot more palatable. Of course, “parts of the house” is just one possible topic. Other classics include: parts of the body, maps with country names, at the grocery store,… You name it! Well, to be precise, it’ll be your students that get to do the naming.

9. Sentence ordering

Build you how correct a sentence do? A simple word ordering question type can work wonders to help your students get a feel for syntax and word order. You as a teacher determine the difficulty.

10. Different questions - Ser y estar

Language learning can’t be all fun and games. Sometimes, you just have to dive in and get your hands dirty. In castellano, we all know that “ser vs. estar” is one of those tough nuts to crack. The Quiz is excellent for allowing you to repeat the same topic/content, but presenting it just a bit different every time. Like we’ve done in this example. Add a splash of color, provide an aesthetically pleasing background image, y ya está.

Wrap up

With BookWidgets, only your creativity’s the limit. Which of these ideas is your favorite? Let us know on Twitter! - @ibookwidgets

Or share your own widgets for Spanish class on our Facebook page so that in turn, you can inspire others!