jasonlinder
Last updated:
9 All-star Sites with Spanish Worksheets for Class
Have you ever taught a class naked?
Probably not—and if you answered “yes” to that question, you had to add something like “but only once, in a weird dream I had.”
In the same way that it would be crazy to teach a class in the buff, it would be almost just as crazy to teach a class without the right resources.
If you want to be a great teacher, you need to “cover yourself” not only by wearing professional clothes, but also by being prepared with a variety of engaging materials, lesson plans, activities and tools to help you teach your classes.
There are many resources out there, of course, but a good worksheet can be one of the best teaching and learning tools, and one of your greatest assets as a teacher.
Worksheets play a fundamental role in having students practice the skills they’re taught, but they can also be just as useful for teachers. That’s because they enable us to evaluate students, often more quickly than through other means, and without the pressure of a formal quiz or test. And if there’s one thing we teachers can use, it’s an effective tool that saves us time.
Worksheets are great, but there are so many of them out there. How do we choose effective worksheets, and how do we use them to keep students engaged and ensure that they’re learning?
In other words, how do we know if a worksheet is good? And where can we find good worksheets?
That’s exactly what we’ll look at today. After taking a quick glance at the characteristics of good worksheets, we’ll get into more details about eight of the best sites where you can find worksheets to use in your class.
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
What Makes a Quality Spanish Learning Worksheet?
In my experience integrating worksheets into my classes over the years, I’ve learned that you need to:
- Adapt each worksheet to your students’ ages and skill levels and, if possible, their preferences, hobbies and interests.
- Make sure the worksheets aren’t predictable, mechanical, repetitive or routine, but that they do have patterns.
- Regularly use handouts with images, colors and big fonts, especially with younger students.
- Make the learning objectives crystal clear.
- Use one worksheet at a time so you can gauge your students’ responses before using others.
- Make sure the worksheets aren’t too hard or too easy.
What Makes an All-star Site for Spanish Learning Worksheets?
The list below is the final product of what has become an exhaustive search for excellent websites that offer useful didactic Spanish learning worksheets to complement my work as a Spanish educator. In this search, I have primarily looked for:
- Enticing sites with user-friendly, easy-to-access interfaces that let you browse through the worksheets
- Sites that offer a useful number of free worksheets to experiment with before requiring any purchase
- Worksheets with a modern, contemporary and “hip” feel that students can connect with
- Worksheets I deem highly useful to my students’ learning needs, according to the points in the section above
- Worksheets that seem novel and creative, unlike the often drab exercises in outdated textbooks (although that’s not meant to criticize textbooks, since there are some great ones out there!)
Beware, fellow Spanish educators, that while you can easily Google the type of worksheet you want and probably find something along those lines, the corresponding documents or PDFs in the search results often need to be accessed through the sites themselves. If you try to print from your Google search, you’ll often get only smaller, unusable versions of the worksheets. Because of that, it’s best to go directly to the sites and to look around.
Now let’s check out these recommended sites!
9 All-star Sites with Spanish Worksheets for Class
Education.com
Education.com lets you to download up to 139 Spanish learning worksheets for free. Each worksheet is connected to a corresponding grade level and includes teacher reviews and a rating out of five stars. Education.com features a wide gamut of topics across all grade levels (from first grade to high school). The best part is that you have free access to the worksheets, and because they’ve collaborated with Google, you can seamlessly save the ones you like to your personal Google Drive linked to your Gmail account.
If you pay a monthly fee of between $10 and $13, or a lifetime fee of $298, you’ll receive a Premium Membership with access to all their worksheets for all subjects, as well as guided lessons and several other teaching tools. Word to the wise: they seem to occasionally run sales—as of this writing, there’s a sale that cuts those prices above in half—so if you’re thinking of signing up, it might make sense to keep an eye on the site for a few weeks to wait for a sale.
Premium Membership also enables you to edit the worksheets by using the “Personalize” feature (directly below the “Download Worksheet” button). Through this feature, you can tailor the sheets to your students and topics, or adjust them to fit your related workbooks, games, activities and lesson plans.
I’m really impressed by Pinterest’s expansive collection of high-quality and easily-accessible educational tools and content. Pinterest’s interface is practically wordless, focusing on the worksheets themselves. It’s also user friendly, allowing you to “pin” (i.e., save) any worksheets you like so that you can return to them later or share them with other teachers or even your students.
On Pinterest there’s no red tape, sales pitches or lengthy explanations like you might find on other similar sites. However, if the site detects that you’ve been searching for a given topic, it might offer you some related links. For instance, it might offer you a link to educational posters for sale if you’ve been searching for Spanish worksheets. It also gives you the option to explore “related pins,” which are pins that are similar to the ones you’ve been looking at. There’s also a great variety of colorful, creative worksheets for younger students.
Lesson Planet
Lesson Planet offers lots of material for K-12 educators, like lesson plans, videos, presentations and apps, but they seem to really excel when it comes to worksheets. And worksheets for teaching Spanish are no exception. Whether you’re looking for a quick review of relative pronouns in Spanish, Spanish weather vocabulary practice or a Sudoku puzzle using Spanish numbers, you’ll find it here.
This site requires a subscription, but that’s because all the material on it is thoroughly reviewed to ensure quality. In any case, subscriptions are very affordable, starting (and ending) at a few dollars a month, and there’s a 10-day free trial offer you can use to try it out.
SoftSchools
Right on this site’s main page you can access worksheets about a range of topics such as fruit, shapes, colors or clothes. The worksheets can prove especially helpful for elementary and middle school students. What I particularly like about SoftSchools, and what separates it from the others, is that all of the worksheets on this site include an answer key. The worksheets are also simple, usually connecting images of objects to their corresponding names in Spanish. This is definitely one of my my go-to sites for young students!
123TeachMe
This site contains great fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice worksheets across many grammar topics. My personal favorite is the fill-in-the-blank worksheet about correctly distinguishing between using the words buen and bien, depending on where they appear in the sentence. This, of course, is always an issue with students since both words often translate to “good” in English, although bien often translates to “well,” too.
The site also features a worksheet creator where you can make your own worksheets in your own style. You can choose from worksheet types like word match, fill-in-the-blank, sentence match, multiple choice or spelling de-scramble. There you can also customize your worksheets to fit grade levels, themes, tenses or grammar topics.
Printable Spanish
Most of the resources on this site are free and very useful for students of all ages and levels! The resources that aren’t free are reasonably cheap; many, for example, cost $2, which is less than many worksheet packets from other sites. My favorite resource in the paid section is the conjugation practice packet. I also like the worksheets related to items in the home, since that’s a topic that isn’t covered much on other sites. Lastly, there are great crossword puzzles and a fun “worm” activity for learning the alphabet.
Cuaderno Español
This Latin American-inspired site has a simple, easy-to-learn interface and features many free PDFs. I like the Question of the Day worksheet that can be tailored to a variety of topics and themes, since it pushes students to keep their minds stimulated by asking a question each day of class.
Keep in mind that a lot of the site is structured to align with the popular Spanish textbook “¡Buen viaje!“ published by Glencoe Spanish. For example, the links to the repaso (review) worksheets on the site’s home page will download worksheets that are comprehensive reviews of the textbook’s chapters. Even if you’re not using this text in your class (and I imagine many of you aren’t), the content could still be highly relevant for students in the beginner or intermediate stages.
Enchanted Learning
This site, which is similar to the SoftSchools site mentioned above, is great for younger students. I find it especially useful that most of the worksheets have pictures, captions and a space for students to write in words. That can sharpen their writing abilities by connecting to vocabulary that’s relevant to the topic and pictures in each worksheet.
Keep in mind that a number of the featured worksheets aren’t accessible as PDFs until you pay $20 for unlimited access for a year. That price may be worth it for many teachers, since the site advertises that it offers access to over 35,000 educational pages for that price. I suspect it could be a good investment, not to mention it’s a lot cheaper than some other sites, which can charge almost as much per month for similar premium access.
Tes
Tes offers worksheets that are unique because the site is frequently updated to reflect new and current events. For example, during the holiday season it offers Spanish worksheets with a Christmas theme. However, the downside is that it sells this particular packet of worksheets as a bundled lesson plan for $2.49. Other worksheets and packets are similarly priced, but if they have what you’re looking for, the price may very well be worth it, especially if you compare the price to what it would cost you in time to make something similar yourself!
Worksheets are quintessential tools for any Spanish educator, but as I hope you’ve seen, finding good ones doesn’t have to be stressful or take all day.
Good luck using these sites and their worksheets in your own classes!
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
Jason Linder, MA, is a doctoral student and intensely passionate Spanish tutor and blog writer. In his free time, he enjoys telenovelas, traveling around Latin America, meditation, yoga, exercise, reading and writing. Learn more about his free Spanish learning resources and tutoring.
