What’s the most important thing in a foreign language class? To give students comprehensible input and show them the language in context. When you can accomplish this and entertain the kids at the same time to keep their interest, you’ve got yourself a win-win situation. During the Food Unit, we decided to google image search some vocabulary words/terms and we found some delicious memes.
Google Image Search is such an easy way to show students differening vocabulary. Want to compare the word “tortilla” in Mexico and in Spain? Google Image Search “Tortilla” and “Tortilla española”. The students can clearly see the difference directly from the pictures. Can same comparisons with “torta” and “torta de chocolate”
Anyway, we found some great memes incorporating the phrases “Tengo hambre” and “Estoy lleno”.
We’ve compiled 9 of our favorites in a powerpoint which we went over with the students in class. You can download this free ppt file by clicking the image below:
A fellow blogger, English teacher Tracee Orman of Hunger Games Lessons, gave us this 
great idea of having students create their own memes. This gets students thinking about their vocabulary and applying it to situations. You can have your students use a meme generator such as ImgFlip, MemeCrunch, DIY LOL, and this site has memes created in Spanish, but some of the language/themes may not be suitable for student viewing. Others popular generators, which were blocked at my school, were Meme Generator, and Make Me a Meme.
An idea might be to save to certain suitable images to a student server and allow the students to select from those images. They can either add text through a simply image ediing software or copy the image into Microsoft Word and create a textbook, changing the layout of the textbox to “in front of text” so they can move it to a designated position over the picture.
Contest:
Feeling creative? We’d like to encourage you to create your own meme to use in your classroom and share that image with us! Need further incentive? Ok, let’s make a contest out of this. We’ll collect submissions starting now until the start of our Spring Break, March 22. We will post all submissions and the top 5 will win 10 Spanish Postcards! First prize winner will get the 10 Postcards, plus 3 Posters! Please e-mail your meme to spanishplans@gmail.com and we will post submissions after March 22.*
