Looking for a fun way to teach house vocabulary in Spanish? Here are 5 great activities to get you started!
1. Give the students a guided tour of your house in Spanish
Make a video giving a guided tour of each room in your house, describing the furniture and the color of the walls.
My students always enjoy seeing my home and it usually inspires them to make their own video tours in Spanish. This eventually becomes one of the choices I offer for their summative assessment. If students are uncomfortable giving a tour of their own home, they also have the option to design and describe a dream home through drawing, clipart, Google Images, or Minecraft! (See #4 to learn more about Minecraft!)
2. Visit Air BnB – en español!
Students work in groups to book an AirBNB in a Spanish-speaking city of their choice. The website allows them to read authentic text in Spanish that includes house vocabulary such as rooms and amenities in each room.
It’s a fun way for students to explore housing in other countries as well as currency and other cultural elements in Spanish. It also gives us the opportunity to address the 5C’s of language learning: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. Students reflect by comparing and contrasting types of rooms and homes they see in other communities and cultures.
3. Read a story with house vocabulary in Spanish
Read a story about Mr. Potato Head’s house in Spanish! Students will learn all the rooms of the house in Spanish with this silly story! Mr. Potato Head gets taken by the family dog and Mrs. Potato Head has to run all over the house to find his missing pieces. This story offers great repetition and fun follow up activities to practice the rooms of the house in Spanish. Here is a preview of the audio book:
4. Design a house using Minecraft
Are your middle school student as obsessed with Minecraft as mine? I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never taken the time to learn how to use this program, but I haven’t needed to because my students are already experts! I ask them to design a house and give a presentation describing each room of the house in Spanish. They LOVE it!
5. Listen to native speakers talk about the rooms of their houses in Spanish
This is another great way to bring culture into a sometimes dry unit. Expose students to homes from around the world by showing them video clips and providing them with listening comprehension practice in Spanish. In this activity, students will hear people talk about their homes as well as view commercials for furniture stores and Barbie’s Dream House in Spanish! I use these activities to promote listening to Spanish outside the classroom by assigning one or two listening comprehension activities per night for homework. Click on the image below for 5 authentic recordings and activities with house vocabulary in Spanish.
If you like these suggestions for teaching the rooms of the house in Spanish and want to see exactly how to teach them in your classroom, check out this unit plan. It includes two and a half weeks of activities and day-by-day teacher lesson plans to take away all the guesswork! Since the lesson plans were written by a teacher and tested out by middle school students, they are very detailed and easy to follow, saving you hours of time!
