I was told by one of my students that they do more games with their Spanish teacher and “lessons are more fun because we spend about 15minutes playing games”.  I have nothing against games but they have to have a purpose and some kind of learning gain.  Here are some favourites with purpose:

If you have the patience to keep reading,

Battleships (submarinos)

Phrases along the top and going down.  Students copy table and put in ships.  Read out along top, say “y” and then read down.  If students get the square where the boat is then they sink it.

Hit : tocado
Miss: agua
Sink: hundido

Scenes we’d like to see/Would I lie to you

Great for teaching tenses or negatives.  Give students a topic and see what they can come up with on mini-whiteboards, award prizes for the funniest/most grammatically sound/most advanced.  E.g  “what her majesty will do at the weekend”  or “things that <insert teacher/student name here> will never do”.

¿Qué falta?

After introducing vocabulary – which one is missing?  Simple and easy to do with pictures

Last man standing

Students write down 4 items of vocabulary that they have learnt from the lesson.  Teacher or student calls them out.  Students cross off the ones called out.  The aim is to be the last man standing.

Speed-dating

Always good for any paired speaking activities.

Reading race

Excellent for pronunciation.  In pairs get students to race to see who can finish the text first whilst saying every word.  To spice it up, get one of them to start when the other reaches the 5th,6th,7th word.

Best sentence/paragraph competition

If you have your students grouped in fours get them competing for best sentence on a mini-whiteboard.  Works with any topic and any ability group

Noughts and crosses

Put the English in the boxes on your board, force pupils to say the TL

Heads down thumbs up

I know I said learning gain and this one only has one if you want to practice mixing tenses and giving opinions

Pienso que es … – I think it’s    Pensaba que fue – I thought it was.    Pienso que va a ser … – I think it’s going to be (get students to guess beforehand).

Infinitive running charades.

Have two lists of infinitives.  Students come to you and you give them one, they act it to their team, team guesses in TL and you work through the list until one team finishes.  For higher level sets use adverbs “passionately”, “slowly” etc

For further ideas look at the following:

• https://www.tes.co.uk/ResourceDetail.aspx?storyCode=3003289&amp;
• http://www.frenchteacher.net/teachers-guide/games-that-work/