Spanish: Futuro y Condicional

Hello everyone, Claudia here,

I wanted to share with you a picture I made for my students to learn the 12 irregular verbs in the future and the conditional tenses in Spanish. I drew a clock and for every hour on the clock I set an irregular verb so that students can learn them and remember them if they draw the clock.

You can also make the clock hands move so you can play with it. Just spin the hands and students will have to conjugate the verb they land on. you can alternate person and number.

Teachers often use the "12 Apostles" of the Christian church as a mnemonic device with these verbs but I prefer using something everyone can relate to; since not everybody belongs to the same religion.

I hope you find this helpful and fun! Enjoy!

Spanish: DOCTOR Mnemonic - Ser y Estar

Hi everyone, Claudia here,

Doctor is a nice mnemonic for remembering the uses of the Spanish verb 'ser'. You should try sharing it with your students, I'm sure it will help them a lot!


D →Description → Ella es alta

O →Occupation → Eres estudiante

C →Characteristic → Él es gracioso

T →Time / Date → Son las tres; hoy es martes

O →Origin → Soy de Venezuela

R →Relationship → Ella es mi abuela

French: La maison d'être

Hello all, Claudia here,

Even though I don't teach French, today I would like to share with you a mnemonic my high school teacher gave us while I was learning French. It is really hard for students to learn when to use the verb être while using the passé composé. One thing my teacher used to do was draw a house on the board and tell us that the 'house verbs' were the ones that used être as an auxiliary. Of course we also had to remember that this would only work if the verb didn't have a direct object.
I hope you find this helpful!

Spanish: WEIRDO Mnemonic - Subjunctive

Hi everyone, Claudia here,

I would like to share another mnemonic with you. This one is to help remember when to use subjunctive in Spanish. I hope you find this useful for your students! And please let me know of any other fun tools you use to teach the subjunctive!


W → Wish
E → Emotion
I → Impersonal expressions
R → Recommendations
D → Doubt
O → Ojalá

Spanish: HELP Mnemonic - Ser y Estar

Hello everyone, Claudia here,

As a follow up on Dan's post on mnemonics I would like to share another easy way to help your students remember the uses of the verb 'estar'.

First, for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, a mnemonic device is a word, rhyme, acronym, etc., to help students memorize information. So, by giving your students a mnemonic you can make it easier and fun for them to learn what you want to teach them.

One mnemonic I use for teaching the uses of 'estar' is help and I present it to my class as follows:

H → Health → Estoy enfermo
E → Emotion → Estoy contenta
L → Location → Indiana está en EEUU
P → Progression → Estoy explicando la gramática


I hope you find this useful for your students! And please let me know of any other fun tools you use in your class either to teach the uses of 'ser' and 'estar' or any other topics!

Teaching Strategies: Mnemonic Devices for German

Dan here again. I'm playing catch up on adding useful tricks and tips. Here are some more mnemonic devices for remembering lists in German:

Accusative Prepositions to the tune of "Camptown Races":
Durch, für, gegen, ohne, um, doo-dah, doo-dah,
Durch, für, gegen, ohne, um, oh doo-dah-day.

Dative Prepositions to the tune of Strauss' "The Blue Danube":
Aus, außer, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu

Possessive Pronouns to the tune of "O My Darlin' Clementine":
Mein und meine,
dein und deine,
sein und seine, ihre, ihr,
unser, unsre,
euer, eure,
sein und seine, ihre, ihr

I'm a newbie at this blogging thing, so including mpegs is something I'll have to work on. Nevertheless, a quick search will turn up these melodies if they aren't coming to mind right away. The words for each will fall fairly intuitively into place.

Spanish: Mnemonic Devices

Dan here. I've recently started studying Spanish and I have a useful mnemonic device I got from one of my German students who is also studying Spanish. Spanish has two verbs for "to be" (estar & ser), which causes some confusion for those of us making regular use of only one--i.e. English speakers et al. My fellow Spanish student provided me with this device to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star": Twinkle, twinkle use estar for how you feel and where you are.

I know it's not much, but as with many mnemonics a little goes a long way.