Last week I came across another excellent post on The Creative Language Classroom, this time on the use of flags for pair work research tasks. Kara Parker has made a colourful set of flags for the 21 countries where Spanish is an official language, and they are available to buy here. I have printed and laminated the flags and I have already used them to randomly pair students for oral work. In my Spanish Novice 1 class I have also had students choose a flag at random as their country of choice for their research project. This has helped avoid the usual problem of students arguing over he countries they want to research and ending up with 20 presentations on Mexico!

A former colleague of mine and good friend Laure Kruger found this snail template and shared it with to be used as a speaking practice activity. It is so simple and I love to use it for students to practice questions and answers, particularly to revise prior to an assessment.

How does it work? Students each have coloured counters and share a dice. Students throw the dice, move that number of squares and then answer the question in the square. If they can't answer the question they miss a go and they may land on a square requiring them to move forwards or backwards. To win the game they must throw an exact number to finish in the centre square. It often takes a few attempts for them to throw the exact number they need and because they keep having to go backwards again, they keep practising and re-practicing the same questions. Take a look at some examples I used recently in class.

Here is the blank document for you to download and use.