Fall is my favorite time of year. I love the crisp air, the pumpkin patch, and the sweater weather. I wanted to share some ways to bring fall fun into your Spanish classroom with pumpkin activities. You will find pumpkin activities for all proficiency levels and ages from elementary through high school Spanish classes! These pumpkin activities provide authentic use of the target language, with videos, songs, jack-o-lantern contests, and more!
Draw the face
Practice shapes and body part vocabulary by describing a jack-o-lantern face. Students should have a worksheet with a few blank pumpkins on it. As they listen to you describe the pumpkins, they will draw the face. For example, tiene dos ojos en la forma de triángulos. La boca es un rectángulo.
Social Emotional Learning Warm-Up
At the beginning of class, I like to use a set of 9 quick images to check-in on my students. It is really fun to find images that relate to the current holiday, time of year, or lesson topic. You can get a set of 26 SEL images with this set, and it includes the pumpkin image and other holiday themed images!
Read a Book
Even if you teach high school, I am a proponent of reading children’s books in Spanish class. The repetitive nature and images make great authentic resources for all ages of learners.
La calabaza rodante is a fun children’s book about a rolling pumpkin. This particular book is a great practice for the subjunctive “Vamos tras ella antes de que ruede más lejos.” It also repeats the question “¿Qué podría hacer aquí?” which is a great use of the conditional tense.
Sopa de calabaza is another fun story about a cat, duck and squirrel who live in a cabin in the woods. Everyday they each have their own duties in preparing their evening pumpkin soup. But one night, they switch things up and it becomes a huge mess! It is a bit longer, but has a lot of preterit and imperfect tense for your advanced students.
¿Dónde está la calabaza?
Every day during the month of September, October, and/or November, hide a pumpkin in your classroom. It could be a real, mini pumpkin or a cut out image. Each day, when students come into your room, they have to find it and describe its location in the target language. “La calabaza está encima del escritorio de la profesora y detrás de su computadora.” This is a great way to reinforce prepositions and classroom vocabulary. Learn more about teaching prepositions to your Spanish students on this blog post.
Giving and Following Directions
Giving directions and following directions are two important skills to acquire in a second language. Practice following directions by watching these videos and following along. To make it challenging for your advanced students, just share the audio first without the video and see what students come up with! Here are two video links for step by step instructions to draw a pumpkin: Video #1 and Video #2. Or, you can have students give the directions to a video with no audio. After they learn commands, this is a fun, authentic way to practice.
Recipe Video
Here is a video from a Mexican woman’s YouTube channel. She has over 400 videos of herself sharing authentic recipes. They are short videos, authentic, and comprehensible for our students! This particular video is a sweetened pumpkin recipe, made for Día de muertos. Share this video with your students and then do a cultural comparison. Are there similar foods they make in the fall? Do they cook pumpkin seeds or pumpkin pie?
Vote for your Favorite Pumpkins
One of the best parts of fall is getting to see all of the unique designs on carved or painted pumpkins. Since this may be hard to do in class, you can do a digital version of a pumpkin gallery walk! Share some of these fun designs with your students. This website has 12 fun and unique decorated pumpkins. Here are over 30 incredible carved pumpkins, including my favorite, a Frida Kahlo pumpkin!
You could upload the images into a Google Forms to collect the votes. Have students describe their favorites in the target language or rank them using ordinal numbers like primero, segundo, tercero, etc. This is a great, authentic way to use preference vocabulary and verbs like gustar.
Sing a Song
These two songs are great for younger students. The first song “Cinco calabazas” is perfect for counting. Add simple manipulatives by having students cut out their own pumpkins and hold up the appropriate amount when it is sung in the song. The second song, “Soy una calabaza” is great for practicing simple descriptions with soy and estoy.
More Fall Activities
If you’re looking for more activities to do during this time of year, here are 8 Spanish Halloween activities, 7 Gratitude Activities for Spanish class, and Day of the Dead vocabulary activities.
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