If you are reading a novel in your Spanish class, we’ve got a new activity that you may want to try. My 8th-grade class is currently reading “La Lucha” by Melisa Lopez. After reading chapter 6, I had students take out a piece of paper and review the chapter and come up with a list of 20 words they felt were most representative or most important to the events of the chapter. It had to be individual words or small phrases of 1-3 words, words that shouldn’t be separated. After they had their own list, I had them work with a partner and share lists. If a word appeared on each partners’ list, they would circle that word and see how many words they had in common. Then, I had partners join another group and as a larger group (of 4+) they had to come to a consensus on the top 10 most essential words from the chapter. The discussion about why a word was important or why one word was more important than another was great to hear. (Note: At this level, the discussion was happening in L1).

Each group then wrote their final 10 words up on the board, and we compared them all. I asked groups if they wanted to make any changes to their lists now that they had seen other groups’ list. Groups debated on whether to stick with their lists or to swap a word out for another.


By having them make their own list, they had to go through the chapter again. Anytime you can find ways for a student to look at a text more than once is a win. They also needed to know what the words meant in order to determine how important it was. So, if they weren’t using the glossary or reading for comprehension the first time, they would need to do so to come up with their list.

By having them work in pairs, they were able to hear additional words and the partners could discuss in a small setting what the words meant or why they choose that word.
The larger group discussion made them really try and evaluate what words were most essential and why.

You could even combine the lists from all classes into a spreadsheet and see what the most chosen words were.

A follow-up to this might be having students write a summary of the chapter using those 10 words their group came up with or write a paragraph using as many words as they can. I even thought about having them use AI to input those 10 words and ask the AI to generate a short story using those words, given the context of the story, and have students read those paragraphs so they get additional input of those terms.

What other follow-up ideas do you have?