Due to circumstances that I definitely could have avoided this morning I needed a low or no prep activity for my Spanish 4 class. I knew I wanted to review a reading that we had done last week, but I didn’t have time to print and make copies. Then I remembered a TikTok, that a colleague had sent me last year (maybe the year before?), about Team Connect 4

In essence, in Team Connect 4, teams of students answer questions for the opportunity to put an X on a connect 4 grid projected onto the board.

Stipulations included: ALL group members had to have the EXACT same thing written. and ALL of their boards have to be up before their Team (color coded with markers) can place an X.

When placing an X students have to follow traditional Connect 4 rules. You must start at the bottom, an X cannot ‘float’. Each time a team gets 4 in a row they get a point(or first to get 4 in a row wins if you want a quicker game). This game board is big enough that students have enough room to get multiple 4 in a Rows. Decide if you want to allow crossing connections or not. Students got pretty strategic while playing too so that was cool to see!

Ok, got an activity. But I didn’t have any questions ready!

I knew that I could come up with game questions pretty quickly with the “Find the Spanish” trick. With this trick you tell students the ENGLISH (or other shared language) translation of a sentence, phrase, or maybe even word, and students copy the L2 from the text. As an added pop-up I asked students to make sure sentences were copied exactly, accents and all.

So I tell students “Find the sentence that means ‘They became very famous” and students scan the text to find ‘se hicieron muy famosos’.

You could come up with questions for all types of games with the ‘Find the Spanish” trick. Some other quick question types could be

Find a sentence that…
shows emotion.
describes someone.
uses a color.
tells someone’s age.
Or anything else you can think of!