High School, Task Cards, + A Freebie!

For the past 7 years, I have been an elementary/middle school teacher and have always taught core content areas (math, science, reading).  Most recently I taught 6th grade math and science.  It has been quite a change for me this year as I have moved to the high school and also started teaching Spanish.  This move leads me to my dream job and I am so thrilled to be teaching foreign language at the high school level.  I am responsible for Levels 1 and 2 and it has been a blast so far.

One of the things that has been a lot of fun for me so far has been incorporating some of the engagement strategies I used in elementary/middle school for my high school students.  I wasn't sure how receptive they would be to some of my ideas but so far they seem to be enjoying them!  One of my favorite ways to have students complete a lot of practice without a lot of whining is to use task cards.  I am able to get students to collaboratively practice a skill for at least 30 minutes and achieve some awesome results.  They are allowed to move around the room and work together which encourages them to speak more comfortably in Spanish with each other.  Since they are traveling around the room, they aren't just stuck in their seats becoming bored with translating sentences.  Here is a picture of my students working on these new task cards I created for comparisons of inequality.

Another hit with my students was this Chutes and Ladders Game I created to practice the conjugations of regular -ar, -er, and -ir verbs.  I printed out 6 copies on card stock and laminated them so that I will have this game for years to come.  To play this game I just cut little squares out of colored craft foam to serve as their game pieces.  I gave each group 2 dice: 1 to determine the subject pronoun and the other for the number of spaces. 1 = yo, 2 = tu. 3= el/ella/ud, 4= nosotros, 5= vosotros, and 6=ellos/ellas/uds.  They took turns rolling the dice and whichever space they landed on they needed to conjugate it to the corresponding subject pronoun.  They seemed to really like this activity!  We just used it for present tense but you definitely could use it for other verb tenses.  Download this game for free from my store and let me know what you think!

Do you use task cards in your high school classroom (or middle or elementary)?  What are some other activities or strategies you use to keep your students engaged and on task?  Let me know in the comments below!