I purchased some "Cool Cubes" this year and have been putting them to good use. The students were really excited about them at first and I think the first time I used them we just wrote vocabulary words on them, rolled them, then said the word in Spanish and English. Needless to say, they became "NOT Cool Cubes" after that. The next time we used them to conjugate verbs and they moved back up a notch on the coolness factor. Anyway, we used them again today to practice the present progressive. I like them because it gives students a variety of choices for subject pronoun, verb matches. They like them, because, well, they are big foam dice! You don't need cool cubes to do this activity, and in fact, until this year I have just been using two dice with a "key" on the board. They use one die to tell them what they subject is and the other for the verb. For example, 1): yo 2): tú, etc and then on the other die 1) comer 2) hablar etc. They roll the dice and conjugate verbs and use them in sentences. Roll a 1 and a 2 and say (or write) "Yo estoy hablando (en la clase de español)". It's a fun alternative to a blah worksheet and the students seem to enjoy it. If you would like to try it out in your class and don't have cool cubes or dice I've included everything you need to give it a try in your class. Just click on the image and get what you need! We used these today with the present progressive tense, but you can use them for any tense! You might try laminating them and using a hot glue gun to glue them together (at least, that's what I would do!) I also included a blank cube so you can write whatever you want! Again, I would laminate first, then you can write, erase, reuse! Your own cool cubes! How cool!
