This page is for materials that you may find useful if you teach Spanish. The two best bits are the first (clothing project) and last (subjunctive writing assignment).

Note: if you are a teacher, your school’s internet setup may block you from downloading these files. In that case, please email me so we can figure out another way for you to get them.

Here are materials for a project in which students research and present a clothing item unique to the Spanish-speaking world. See below for a Spanish poetry project.

Here are a few honed-over-the-years, one-page grammar summaries:

• The pretérito: Todo el pretérito
• Pretérito vs. imperfecto: palabras claves. See also this blog post and this one.
• “Spanish linguist’s guide to verb conjugations” (this links to a blog post)
• Present tense of subjuntivo: Sumario del presente del subjuntivo
• Ser vs. estar: usos de SER y ESTAR
• Present tense irregulars — a summary by type (includes lovely boot verb table)
• Commands (in this post)
• Various types of pronouns PLUS possessive adjectives, with an activity to practice nosotros vs. nuestro vs. various uses of vos: Pequeño repaso de pronombres
• Por vs. para: por y para. When I hand out this sheet, I blank out the “Explicación” column of the second table so that students can fill it in as an in-class exercise (working in pairs) or as homework.

More to download:

• Someone else’s terrific summary of ser vs. estar uses, including substantial lists of adjectives commonly used with each verb.
• 13 easy poems from around the Spanish-speaking world. I used this for a lesson discussed in this blog post.
• My current composition error correction code: Guía de revisión. The idea is to point out the errors so that the student can fix them.
• “Jack y la habichuela gigante,” a story-based preterite vs. imperfect activity from the textbook Imágenes that I discussed in this post.
• A complete list of the more than 200 boot verbs of Spanish, plus 90 (!!!) -zco verbs: irregular verb list.
• From a professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, a list of popular fiction titles from Spain, suitable for an advanced student or a Spanish teacher: Lecturas.
• Elsewhere on this website, a slideshow with some asymmetrical Spanish/English correspondences
• My favorite writing activity for the subjunctive: a creative dialogue between two famous people (real or fictional) where every line uses the subjunctive: diálogo subjuntivo indicativo . You can imagine the possibilities, for example:
       Romeo: Quiero que nos casemos.
       Julieta: Tengo miedo de que mi padre te mate.
       etc.