Teaching your students how to say the date in Spanish lends itself to many possible interactive communication exercises. Students combine numbers in Spanish with the days, months and names of holidays. The following activity gets your students forming and pronouncing sentences to express the date in Spanish.
Before class, on a piece of standard paper, draw four straight lines going down and ten going across. You will end up with fifty five more or less equal rectangles that you will be writing words into. It is not important how even the rectangle are or how many you have.
Now write ten dates in Spanish on the board for your student to see. Spell out each number and month. For example, if the first date I picked was 3/12/1990 on the board I would write: el doce de marzo del año mil novecientos noventa. When your ten dates are written out take your sheet of paper with the fifty five rectangles and write the numbers that represent the dates in the blanks. For the example date given above you would write “3” in one box, “12” in another box and “1990” in the next. Do this for each date on the board. You will have extra spaces on your sheet, but that is ok. You may want to save a blank copy of this sheet to use in a future activity.
Make about twenty copies of this sheet of paper with the dates. When class starts break your students into groups of twos or threes. Give each group a copy of the dates and a pair of scissors. Instruct them to cut out each rectangle that contains a number in it. The extra paper can be recycled. If you have time or if you have a student assistant you can cut these numbers out ahead of time and place them in an envelope. Since you will be teaching this concept during future classes you could even laminate the numbers and make a class set.
Tell each group to spread out the numbers on their desks. Their task is to look at the dates on the board and, using the numbers in front of them, form the same dates. The students will work together to figure out the months, days and years. When each group has formed the ten dates check for accuracy. Now choose different students in class and ask, “¿Cuál es la fecha de hoy?” while pointing to a date on the board.
This activity will work for middle school up until high school. Make sure you get your students pronouncing the dates and this will be a very effective exercise.