Teaching remotely has brought a whole set of new challenges. One of the hardest is to keep students engaged in my Spanish classes for 45 minutes. The younger the students the more challenging it gets! I feel that sometimes I am an entertainer more than a teacher in this situation. Maybe I always have been, but now I’m conscious of it! My biggest allies in these moments when I’m starting to loose their attention are games. Competitive games especially. You can see them come alive when I say “Vamos a jugar!”

I try to play a game in every class, even if it’s short. In my school we have many of our classes divided into pods of about 10 children. We have two pods per grade and we also have students who are attending remotely. A game brings both pods and the remote learners (they belong to one of the two pods) to play each other. My student love that. Trying to beat the other pod makes the game even more interesting to them.

So I will share some of the games I have been using and I may share some of the screens so you can use them too.

Tic Tac Toe

This is game is quick 5- 7 minutes, it’s a perfect way to change activities for a bit. You can place vocabulary words kids have to say or short phrases, numbers and letter too. Recently I created a Halloween one with pumpkins, and the way it works is you create the grid in Google classroom or use a jpeg online. Then you type the numbers in and you can use circles to cover them to give the surprise element.

Hangman ( I call it “Dulces para el Extraterrestre” “Candy for the alien”

This game is great if you are practicing letters or if you have a bit of time left in your class. You will need at least 5 minutes!

This is the base:

This is an example of the game in action. You will need to draw circles in Google classroom and move them into the jar when the students don’t guess the right letter. Also write a lost of the letters students have called out so they don’t repeat themselves…

To be continued…!