¡Hola profe! I hope your summer break is off to a fantastic start and that you’ve had some time to relax a bit and spend time doing what you love!
While summer is the perfect time to unwind and recharge, it’s also a great opportunity to earn some extra money. Teaching over the summer can certainly look different – you may be teaching much smaller groups, or even individually. Your students’ needs might also vary from the norm: perhaps students are trying to fill in gaps from this past school year, or are looking for enrichment lessons to stop the “summer slide.” If you are teaching Spanish this summer through an extended school year (ESY) program, private tutoring, or in another smaller-group setting, here are 3 fun, engaging activities that will help you connect with your students and make learning over the summer as enjoyable for them as possible!
#1: Boom Cards.
Boom Cards are digital task cards hosted through the Boom Learning site. On each card, students are given a task to complete, and once they have done so, the site tells students immediately if they have the correct answer! Students can retry until they get the answer correct.
You can use Boom Cards for free, and can receive informational reports for up to 5 students! This makes Boom Cards perfect for private tutoring or small ESY Spanish classes! Boom Cards make great pre-assessments or formative assessments. If you have classes with more than 5 students, you can still use Boom Cards, but will not receive informational reports. Reporting and other features are available with upgraded memberships, however.
Want to try Boom Cards? Click the link below to get your FREE Boom Cards on weather and seasons!
Try it Free!
Sign up below to receive a FREE Boom Cards deck on weather and seasons that you can use with your students immediately!
Here are some of my other favorite Boom Cards decks:
#2: Preguntas Personales.
If you are trying to get to know your students or build a community with them, let preguntas personales help you! One thing that I have found about teaching high-school students is that the majority of them like to share about themselves. Preguntas personales add a personalized aspect to instruction and can make students feel more connected to the content, as they can see how it relates to their lives.
In a small-group setting, I would have students use preguntas personales to interview one another. Have students ask the questions to a partner, and record their partners’ responses. Then, students can share what they learned with the rest of the class. Not only is this a great way to practice speaking and writing, it allows students to get to know their classmates and helps build a sense of community.
If you are tutoring one-on-one, you can ask the questions to help your student develop speaking and listening skills, and to get to know your student better! Sometimes, students can be a bit quieter or more reluctant to share when they are studying one-on-one with a teacher, but preguntas personales can help you connect with your tutoring students and bring them out of their shells a bit!
Check out some of my favorite ready-to-use preguntas personales sets here!
#3: Board Games.
Your students may have mixed feelings about studying over the summer, so why not make your lessons as fun for them as you can?
Board games are a great way to both promote learning and engage your students! They are perfect for small groups, so if you have a small ESY class, no worries! If you have a larger class, board games will still work, you’ll just need to divide your class into smaller groups! Tutoring one-on-one? Play against your student and see if he/she can beat you!
So, where can you get board games to use with Spanish students? You can always make your own – you can create a template on Microsoft Word or Google Docs by creating a table and removing the gridlines of the boxes you don’t want to use until I made a winding path. Then, fill the spaces with a verb to conjugate, a sentence with a blank to fill in, a question to answer, a picture to identify, or whatever will reinforce the content of the unit! You can also add special spaces, like “Lose a turn” or “Move _____ spaces forward/back.”
To help make game play easier for use in an ESY or larger group setting, you can also have an instruction sheet that tells students how they should move through the game board and how to win. Place students into small groups (3-4 students) and have them move through the board, completing the tasks on each space. I tell my students that they have to answer correctly in order to remain on the space (otherwise, they have to go back to the space where they started their turn), but you can make your own rules!
You can raid your own board game collection at home for game pieces and dice if you like, or you can purchase them. They are pretty inexpensive on Amazon!
However, if making your own board games isn’t your thing, I’ve got you covered! Here are some of my favorites:
Click here to check out my entire board game collection!
I hope this was helpful! If you’re teaching this summer, feel free to send me an email and let me know how it’s going! Have a fantastic week, profe!
Señora Q 