Looking for some easy-to-prep, engaging activities for your world language class? Check these out for some low and no prep fun.

Hot Potato 

Beginner/A. Use this for any vocab recall you have. It’s great fun. When the music goes off, the students start asking questions, making for a naturally communicative activity for the world language class. I love to use pictures (they keep the pictures as points). 

Intermediate/B. When you get the Hot Potato, you might say three things about yourself, or some other theme.

Advanced/C. When it stops on you, you have to narrate something in the past. Perhaps you’re going to tell a story about your childhood, your most memorable trip or the best day of your life. Where’s the baby? I love using toy babies for teaching language.

Babies 

Beginner/A. I love using dolls to teach prepositions in my world language class. I put the baby in different places and ask them where it is and they have to use those prepositions to tell me where it is. 

Intermediate/B. Students can fluently write and write a couple of sentences and share about where the baby is. 

Advanced/C. Put on a timer and have students tell a story about either the baby’s childhood or their childhood.

Guess Who? 

Beginning/A. Use the target language to learn basic descriptions in a beginning world langauge class. I have a cheat sheet card that I use to help students be able to play the game completely in the target language. 

Intermediate/B. Students have to be able to play the game completely in the target language without the use of the card and they need to be able to describe the members in the game and all the faces and characters they see.

Advanced/C. They have to play with the structure either. It’s great fun and a great way to practice fluency. At the table. The table is the best place to learn a language. 

Simple Likes and Dislikes

Beginner/A. People sit around a table, where you can put items, pictures, foods, and they talk about what they like and what they don’t like-an essential skill to develop in any world language class.

Intermediate/B. Taste Tests. I give students a clipboard and a list of some different foods from the target language country. They’re all listed with some space next to it. Students try the foods on the table and they write a few sentences to talk about their likes, their dislikes, and about the foods in general. 

Advanced/C. Sit them around the table and let them talk in the target language. Chatting never gets old in the world language class.

Two Truths and a Lie 

Beginning/A. I love to play a different version of this for low novice level that I call Is it true? 

Whatever vocabulary I’m teaching them, I make a list of statements, some true and some false that they can easily understand. For example, this person likes hamburgers, this person likes tacos, et cetera. They have to think about the people they know in their class and decide if it’s true or not.

We then go over it and we discuss all the statements. I find this naturally immersive and an easy way to foster communication at all levels in any world language class.

Intermediate/B. I love the classic Two Truths and a Lie. 

Students write out two truths and a lie and they share and we decide as a class is it true or not and why? We want to guess which one is the lie. 

Advanced/C. I would divide the students up into different groups. The students are going to do a more extended version of their Two Truths and a Lie. 

For example, if you had two groups, in one group, one student would have the lie and two of them would have true stories. In the other group, two students would lie and one would have a true story. Of course, the objective is to guess the lie. At the advanced level, there’s a great deal of conversation that goes on to figure out which stories are true and which are lies.

New People

Beginning/A. I love having a target language meeting and greeting “party”. I give students name tags early in the year. Once they’ve had a class or two, we have a “party”. The students have to practice all their meeting and greeting to everyone else in the class in a culturally appropriate way in the target language- a must-learn skill in your world language class.

Intermediate/B. Exchange Student Party. I absolutely love this. I assign each of my students a place that they “come from” in the Spanish-speaking world. They then have to become a character from that place and they have to be able to answer a series of questions about themselves.

They have to research, for example, their education system, what their cities like, what the weather is like there and learn and memorize all of the questions and answers. They then come to the party and meet everyone else. They have to take notes about a couple of other students. This incorporate so many skills, including culture- an essential. We must have the goal of developing interculturality on the world language class.

Advanced/C. I love to get guest speakers from the target language into my classroom on Google Hangouts from #italki.

I love using Italki to be able to have my students connect and have a conversation and build that confidence with native speakers. You can also record using YouTube live. You have a great listening activity for later on. One of my favorite world language class activities.

Photo Shoot 

Beginner/A. Bring in a photo and describe the things you see in it.

Intermediate/B.  Bring in photos and describe what’s in it or perhaps take pictures demonstrating emotions and you narrate it to create a film.

Students create at the intermediate level. I love having students do a tour of their house, like Benny Lewis (@irishpolyglot) always did. Students can take their phone and take you around their house and tell you about it in their target language or they can take some pictures, put them on Google slides and narrate it in Fishbole.

Advanced/C.  Take photos and put them out on a storyboard. This could be about a trip they took a different time in their life and they have to read, tell and narrate from the photos. Great practice on their writing about the past in your world language class.

Looking for some more activities for your world language class? Check more out here.