A Movie Game for Spanish Class

There is a “professional illness” that relentlessly attacks us Spanish as a foreign language teachers and which permanently affects sufferers: our eyes become scanners in search of real life material to use for classroom activities. You see a commercial on TV and an activity on uses of the imperative pops into your head. Walking down the street you read a sign advertising an apartment for rent and you think of the impersonal passive tense… I’m not immune to the syndrome, and as I’m a passionate fan of the silver screen, I tend to look for ways to create teaching material out of just about any short, medium or feature length film that crosses my path.

In La Orotava, in the north of Tenerife, a festival of short films is celebrated which, during 3 days, offers a nice overview of what’s being filmed in the Canary Islands and in the rest of Spain. Many of today’s best known filmmakers got their starts in the world of short film, and I like checking out what’s happening in this world, watching its latest offerings, formulating opinions on them, voting for the best one, and meeting other movie dorks like me. 

A few years ago, I noticed that the poster for La Orotava’s short film festival featured a series of simple yet attractive caricatures of some of film’s most recognizable characters… That’s when the idea hit me: to organize a game for Spanish language class making use of the images and our general knowledge of movies.

A Game for Spanish Language Class

I just happened to know one of the festival organizers, and she was able to get me a stack of the posters after I explained to her that I needed them for a classroom activity. I appreciate the organizers’ friendliness and generosity and how they liked the idea of how the activity could generate exposure of the small local event to an international sphere. Using the caricatures of the movie icons as prompts, which you can find here. I put together a list students could use to identify the character, the actor, or the movie being referred to, because I know not everyone is as much of a movie fanatic as I am.

The first game option, for a level A2 group for example, would be to hand out an image to each student and ask them to describe the character they have and try to get their classmates to identify who it is. Later, in a larger group, you can make a list of the movies the characters are from and ask each student to find a summary on the internet of the films from the list they’ve never seen. Students then explain the movie to the group, without giving away the title, until someone guesses the name of it. At this point, students will likely get the chance to observe the funny way in which movie titles are changed for Spanish audiences (the example I always give of this is with the Woody Allen movie Love and Death, which is called in Spanish La última noche de Boris Grouchenko).

You could even take the game a step further, using the same material, by having each student take a card with the name of a movie, character, or actor, and asking the rest of the students if they have a card which corresponds with the same movie (this takes some photocopying and scissor work). When interacting with one another, students are instructed to use the structure: “Necesito un personaje que sea…, que tenga…”.

You can use your imagination to develop your own versions of the game, like having each student describe a movie while classmates try to guess the title. You can also have students describe the last movie they’ve seen, or one that they particularly enjoyed at some time in their lives, they could explain why they liked it so much…