How to teach Spanish adjectives

Spanish adjectives is a unit that appears at the beginning of almost any Spanish I curriculum. What middle school or high school student doesn’t love talking about themselves or their friends? As Spanish teachers, our number one goal is to motivate students to communicate, so why not choose a topic that they already love,  right?  Whether you are using a traditional Spanish textbook or writing your own Spanish curriculum, teaching adjectives in Spanish is an engaging and useful theme for students. Here are some activities with Spanish adjectives that you and your students may enjoy!

Introducing adjectives in Spanish: Personality first

In my class, we always start with adjectives to describe personality first. This is a conscious choice. Before anything else, I want my students to leave my classroom as good humans. So we focus on describing ourselves and others from the inside out. I want them to understand that their personalities are more important than their physical traits. 

I introduce the spanish adjectives by acting out the vocabulary with my students. We write down the words and draw pictures or come up with word clues to help us learn each term. Next, we review  the spanish adjectives with a slideshow of celebrities and cartoon characters. I give the students choices between two adjectives for each picture so they see each word again in context. Now they have a physical gesture and a visual image for each spanish adjective. 

Reading activities 

I wrote this story, Cinderella y las hermanastras antipáticas, as a way to sneakily reinforce the idea of noun-adjective agreement in Spanish. This simple story is great for beginning Spanish students because most of the students already know the story of Cinderella. Having background knowledge makes the story even more comprehensible. I read the story aloud to my students the first time and overly exaggerate the plural adjective endings by hissing like a snake. If you feel silly doing that, you can always show them my video instead. Students then re-read the story to their partners for repetition and comprehension before answering the questions at the end. For visual learners, I also ask students to choose three colors. They highlight all the descriptions of Cinderella in one color, all the descriptions of her step-sisters in another color, and Prince Charming in his own color. This strategy allows students to see the noun-adjective agreement in a different way. 

Additional practice

My students also watch videos, play Kahoot, dice games, and Quizlet Live to really master the Spanish adjectives to describe personality. Click here to see the complete day by day unit plan on Spanish adjectives! 

Introducing Spanish adjectives to describe physical traits

After a quiz on personality adjectives in Spanish, we move on to physical characteristics and traits. I introduce the vocabulary with some celebrity photos and some personal questions to students. 

Celebrity A is blonde. Raise your hand if you are blonde? Ah! You are blonde and you are blonde. They are not blonde. I am not blonde. I have brown hair. Who has brown hair? 

Next, I pass out mini white boards and read some basic descriptions in Spanish to students. They draw what they hear and hold up their boards for me to check their work.

• The boy is tall and skinny. He has long hair.
• The girl is strong. She has curly hair.
• The dog is small and fat.

We will do several other practice activities with spanish adjectives to describe physical traits here before moving on to our mystery drawings activity!

Mystery drawings 

This is a great activity to showcase student creativity! Students begin by drawing a detailed picture in color of a person or character. I ask them to think about what spanish adjectives they may use to  describe their picture and to as they draw it. I also remind them to keep their drawings secretive! Next, they write a short, simple paragraph in Spanish describing their masterpiece! They fold the paper so the image is hidden but the paragraph is still visible. Finally, they trade papers with a classmate who must recreate the drawing by reading the paragraph. Students love to compare the first and second drawing to see how well they were able to describe the physical traits of their creation!

Guess who

The game Guess Who or ¿Adivina Quién? Is a favorite on the Facebook Groups for Spanish teachers. During distance learning I saw tons and tons of posts where teachers created their own boards using each other’s Bitmoji, which I thought was adorable! I am lucky enough to have my own classroom set of the actual board game in Spanish. It’s a favorite activity among my students to practice spanish adjectives for physical traits. I tape a cheat sheet inside each box for words we had not covered. 

• ¿Tiene barba o bigote? – Does he have a beard or mustache?
• ¿Es calvo? – Is he bald?
• ¿Lleva sombrero? – Does s/he wear a hat?
• ¿Lleva lentes? – Does s/he wear glasses?

Puzzles

I like to use puzzles as a challenging activity for my high achieving students. Typically, I include them as part of stations. These puzzles focus on noun-adjective agreement. The pieces only fit together if you match a logical noun and adjective together. 

Spanish adjectives final project

Our final assessment for our Spanish adjectives unit is the first time my students will do a “formal” writing assignment. We do tons of practice with this, including filling out graphic organizers before I let them off on their own.

The final product is a short paragraph describing themselves, someone else, and a pair of similar people. I wrote an entire blog post explaining the assignment that you can check out for more details! 

This is just a sample of the activities we do in my middle school classroom to teach adjectives in Spanish.