10 Spanish Role-Playing Scenarios to Use in Your Classroom
Have you ever tried to do role playing in Spanish class? If not, you’ll be surprised how many benefits it’ll bring to your students.
Today, I’ll tell you why role play in Spanish classes is a brilliant idea. Students of all ages will love your classes, which is great since a positive attitude is crucial for effective learning.
I’ll give you 10 ideas for role play in Spanish and list the materials or preparation needed. Ready to have some fun? Here we go!
What is Role Playing?
Role play in Spanish translates to juego de rol or juego de roles, but what’s the definition of role play? It’s any speaking activity that requires you to pretend you’re another person in an imaginary situation.
You can be a tourist lost on a street somewhere in Mexico city, a bank client, a shopper, or even a president. The scenario can be whatever you want. For example, a restaurant role play in Spanish, checking into a hotel, or navigating the airport. The sky’s the limit.
Benefits of Role Play in Spanish
Role play in Spanish is super fun. Kids love pretending but you’ll be surprised to see how easily teens and adults get into it, too.
Role playing gives quieter students the chance to express themselves and practice speaking.
Best of all, it gives your students an opportunity to practice their skills for real-life situations. Broaden your classroom and let in the outside world. Students practice pronunciation, sentence structure, and specific vocabulary and expressions when they role play!
Last, role play is a bonding activity. Your students interact, laugh, argue, and forge relationships. Your classroom environment is enhanced through role play in Spanish lessons.
Let me show you how to role play in Spanish.
10 Scenarios for Role Play in Spanish
Role play is not so much age-related as level-related. Check out the following examples of role playing scenarios to use in primary school up to adult classes.
Choose imaginary situations relevant to your students. I’ve divided the role play scenarios into two groups:
1. Beginner level: basic situations focused on specific vocabulary and expressions
2. Intermediate to advanced: more complex situations that require students to employ grammar and vocabulary skills
Materials and visual aids are helpful for role-playing with children. They get excited to dress up, plus it makes getting into character easier.
Beginner Level Role Play in Spanish Scenarios
Use these role plays with beginner students after pre-teaching vocabulary and useful expressions. Prompt cards make the activity easier for low-level students.
1. At the Doctor
- Materials: white shirts, toy medical kits, prompt cards
- Number of students: 2-4
- Physical space ideas: Set up your classroom as a doctor’s office, a desk, and two chairs; perhaps add another desk as an examination table.
- Helpful resources:
Organize this role play for two people as doctor or nurse and patient. Prepare prompt cards with useful expressions for the doctor or nurse and symptoms for the patients.
2. At a Restaurant
- Materials: table, chairs, menu, plastic plates and cutlery, toy food, prompt cards
- Number of students: 2+
- Physical space ideas: large enough to accommodate chairs and tables for a restaurant setup
- Helpful resources:
Practice food vocabulary, as well as how to order and request things. This works as pair practice or you can divide your students into bigger groups of customers. Kids love adding plastic food, plates, and cutlery.
3. Shopping at the Market
- Materials: real or plastic fruits and vegetables, prompt cards
- Number of students: 2+
- Physical space ideas: Separate the space between the customer and a shopper with a table and place products.
- Helpful resources:
It’s a role play in Spanish class to practice market vocabulary and measurement and weight units. Prepare prompt cards for the shopkeeper and customers or have your students create shopping lists.
For example, the card may say:
- Buy all the necessary products for a vegetarian dinner party
- Make a chocolate cake
- Search for a recipe and go to a shop to buy the ingredients
It can be a simple game, or you can set up the whole market with different students playing for example a baker or butcher.
4. Asking for Directions
- Materials: maps, prompt cards, backpack stuffed with newspapers, prompt cards
- Number of students: 2+
- Physical space ideas: Design streets with desks and chairs and place cards on the floor with location names.
- Helpful resources:
This popular role-play scenario ranges from simple with two students playing a tourist and a local. Alternatively, set up the classroom as an imaginary city and use index cards or post-it notes with location names.
For example:
- ayuntamiento – town hall
- iglesia – church
- cine – cinema
5. Selling and Buying
- Materials: prompt cards, anything you have in your classroom—a pencil, an eraser
- Number of students: everybody in your class
- Physical space ideas: create some space for the salesperson to give their pitch and place chairs in a row for audience members
- Helpful resources:
Have your students sell a certain product (or service) chosen by you or them. It could be a classroom plant, a marker, a sheet of paper, or a haircut.
This game helps your students practice using adjectives to describe everyday objects.
Have your students take turns making their presentations while everyone else is watching. In the end, each student writes down the one thing they want to buy, and the one who gets the most orders wins.
6. Making a Complaint at a Hotel
- Materials: prompt cards
- Number of students: 2+
- Physical space ideas: use a desk as the hotel’s front desk and a chair for the receptionist
- Helpful resources:
This fun role play in Spanish is for practicing hotel vocabulary and complaints. Prepare prompt cards with imaginary problems. For example:
- mi cuarto no tiene almohadas – my room has no pillows
- la ventana no se abre – the window does not open
- no hay electricidad – there is no electricity
- la televisión no funciona – the TV does not work
Have students take turns presenting their complaints.
Intermediate and Advanced Level Role Plays in Spanish
These four scenarios require your students to manage more advanced grammar structures and improvise.
7. The Whodunit Role Play
- Materials: prompt cards, costumes
- Number of students: 3+
- Physical space ideas: accommodate your chair in a circle or have your students walk around the class and talk to chosen people
- Helpful resource: A Handy Spanish Vocabulary Guide for Police Officers
This detective game encourages students to practice speaking and logical thinking. One student is a murderer, one student is the detective, and everyone else is an innocent suspect.
Check out these scenarios in English and translate and adapt them for a role play in Spanish.
8. The End of the World
- Materials: prompt cards, costumes
- Number of students: 8+
- Physical space ideas: accommodate the chairs in a circle
- Helpful resources:
The end of the world is coming, and you need to hide in a bunker to save humanity. Unfortunately, the bunker has space only for 4 people.
Each student gets a card with the description of their profession or just the name of their job. (a priest, a housewife, a doctor, a teacher, a carpenter, etc) They need to convince other people to choose them to survive.
Each student needs to choose four people that would survive and justify their decision. Have your students bring costumes and props from home.
9. Famous People Party
- Materials: prompt cards, costumes, real food, list of guests.
- Number of students: 4+
- Physical space ideas: desks set up as one big dinner table
- Helpful resources:
My students love this role play. Give them their cards with names of famous people. They have to come dressed up as that person for the next class. Perhaps ask each student to bring food to share.
During the dinner, students assume their character’s personality and talk about their life and work without giving away their names. Each student receives a list of guests and, by the end of the party, needs to write down the names of their classmates next to the characters.
10. Job Interview
- Materials: prompt cards
- Number of students: 2+
- Physical space ideas: accommodate two chairs and a desk
- Helpful resources:
Have all the students apply for the same job. Prepare prompt cards for the interviewer and character cards for other students. The students will need to answer the questions according to their assigned personality, and clues that give information about their experience, family situation, salary requirement, and anything else you want to add.
Get Help With Role Play in Spanish Classes
Empower your students through role-play in Spanish and give them a strong foundation.
Spanish is one of the principal subjects that most students begin studying in elementary school. Upon enrolling in high school, they will find that Spanish is available for both the Advanced Placement (AP) test and the SAT II Subject Test. It will be much easier if they start the course with strong language skills. Learning Spanish at an early age can reduce the stress of these courses and make them more enjoyable—and ultimately more rewarding.
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