Here are some of my favorite activities for teaching students to understand and talk about descriptions in Spanish.
Day one. Start with the presentation.Spanish Descriptions Pear Deck Activity It teaches appearance in context.
Next, do a set of immersive quizzes. You’ll see the directions, as well as the visuals, to print out.
Each day during the unit, I like to do one or two of the appearance surveys. You can either put these up on a digital board, you can print these out and have each student have them, or do it as a Language Experience Approach (where you use the survey to keep it communicative and write the correct version of what they said without getting into any explanations).
However you choose to do it, talk with students, and they talk amongst themselves about the different ways to categorize people in terms of appearance. Then go over it together as a group. The graphics in each will help the students understand at this beginning level.
Next I like to play a round of ¿Eres tú?. Basically, all your students are going to stand up. You’re going to describe a student. When they know it’s not them, they’re going to sit down. For example, you might say, “He has blond hair.” Everybody without blond hair is going to sit down.
They need to be trained sometimes if they get enthusiastic to be quiet during this activity so that they can hear what you’re saying. You often have to help some students that didn’t understand, too. You might even want to reassure them beforehand that you’ll let them know if they didn’t understand something with some sort of signal.
Go through this until you’ve gone through everybody. It might be difficult if you have a large class to do in a day. In that case, I would do it over the course of two or more days.
Day Two. Do the immersive quizzes again.
Do some more surveys, and do another round of ¿Eres tú?.
You can assign another set of puzzles for homework, or you could have them get started on playing Guess Who? if you’ve got the board game. There’s a handout for you if you’ve got the board game. I like to make sure these are printed out in color and laminate them.
I bought a few sets of Guess Who?, travel size, for very cheap on Amazon. It was well worth the cost. Students often will bring them in as well if they have them at home. The card can be used to play as they learn to talk about appearance. This is probably one of the most effective ways of teaching students how to speak about appearance and learn all those adjectives in context.
Day Three. Do another set of immersive quizzes, and another set of surveys.
If you’re lucky enough to have Guess Who?, play that. If you want to do it with using the people in your class, just play another game of ¿Eres tú?.
You can have them be the leader, too. The students can even write out one or two sentences to describe each person, or to describe themselves, and hand them to you on tiny slips of paper. You look them over quickly and correct them, and the students then use them as calling cards for who gets eliminated. Easy, fun and low-prep.
Day Four. Do the last set of quizzes and Guess SpanishActivityGuessWhotolearndescriptions-1Who?. One of my favorite assessments for this unit is to have students play Guess Who? completely in Spanish without the card. Again, if you don’t have the games, you can have them each take a turn where they are the leader in front of the entire class, deciding who stands up and who sits down based on being eliminated, and each student serves as leader. Doing that successfully can be a quiz grade. They can even do it in pairs to lower anxiety or small groups.
If you’d like something that’s smaller group, go ahead and print out the Concentration/Go Fish cards. Basically, you’re going to want to cut these out, shuffle them up for each deck, and place them face down. Students will look for matches and pairs until they’ve matched all of them. You can play Go Fish, too.
The last day we wrap up with some writing. The first thing I give them is the Adjective Charts and Quiz. As you see, the chart has some common adjectives, and it’s all filled in for them. They have seen quite a few adjectives in context, and this is a good time to talk about the rules if you haven’t done so already. I find that it’s most effective to lead with language in context as opposed to explaining with the rules and communicating later.
Students should practice selecting a number of people in class. Choose 5 or 10, and see if they can write down how to describe them. They should then work with some partners to check their answers. You’ll go around with a pen and make corrections, and everyone can share.
One quiz is the chart quiz on adjectives, having to fill it out accurately, and selecting a number of people in class to describe correctly using adjectives.
A fun activity is to hand out the chat mat on descriptions. Students will use it to sketch a person and describe it in Spanish. They pair up with another student who does the same. Students describe their creations to another, who then sketches the person they described. Make a gallery of the masterpieces. Spanish Lessons: Describing People Bundle