One of my favorite units to teach is emotions using ser vs estar! I love letting my students showcase their personalities, and teaching them to express their feelings is such an important life skill. Plus, the drama of middle school and high school makes talking about your feelings a high interest, and highly relatable topic!
One of my all-time favorite projects to practice ser vs estar is the Spanish selfie project. Students create a comic strip making various faces to illustrate their feelings. Then they write another logical caption so they demonstrate the different uses or ser vs estar.
However, this project can also just be used as an outlet for students to show off their personalities and learn how to describe their feelings, like this example below.
Use Google Slides to create emotion comics
In this tutorial, I show students how to use Google Slides to create their very own selfie comic strip to practice ser vs estar. There are also some really good tech tips for teachers and students as well.
Did you know that you can take pictures of yourself directly in Google Slides? This way, you don’t have to worry about importing an image from your phone or social media!
Students then use shapes or text boxes to create speech bubbles or captions to show their understanding of ser vs estar in Spanish. The final products are adorable and a great alternative to boring ser vs estar worksheets or quizzes!
More practice with ser vs estar
While the selfie project is by far my favorite, I have always used it as an assessment at the end of the unit. Here is a list of other activities to use while introducing and practicing ser vs estar.
Charades: This is a great game to accompany this project. It motivates kids to be silly when they take their pictures!
Nick Jonas está en el supermercado: My students always remember this silly Spanish story about a fan’s reaction to seeing Nick Jonas at the grocery store. It’s one of their favorite stories to act out and it also does a great job of illustrating ser vs estar using adjectives and feelings.
Tic-Tac-Toe: I love this alternative to boring worksheets! It’s technically still a worksheet – students fill in the correct forms of the verbs, but they do it on a Tic-Tac-Toe board, so it’s way more fun!
