Throughout the years, I have spent countless hours making up speech and language homework calendars and homework packets for my students. I want my students to succeed and I want them to not regress on their skills over the summer. But I have a problem. A big one.

You know how many students have completed those calendar packets over the years? One. I’m willing to bribe my students with a Costco-sized candy bar, but as much as I try, my students don’t complete homework.

I realize there’s several things at play here, like poverty in the district, migrant parents who are literally working all day, and a lack of access to basic school items such as pencils and crayons outside of school, to name a few. (It breaks my heart a little every time a student says they don’t have crayons/pens/pencils at home.)

Working with Spanish-speaking students also means most of the pre-made materials aren’t available. Each year, I piece together homework packets in Spanish, and it takes FOREVER (with a very low rate of return).

So I decided to work smarter. This year I created 5 Minutos de Lenguaje. Cinco Minutos de Languaje is a no prep way for me to have homework for my students. Simply print and go - everything is in Spanish already! No translating, no cutting and pasting a hundred different papers…Just print. And if I want to cut out the four cards on the page, it’s quick. For summer homework, I just print the three pages for the set I want the student to work on and it’s ready. There are four cards to a page, so during the school year, I can just print out a page and cut it into quarters.

Cinco Minutos de Lenguaje is entirely self-contained. My students who don’t have any materials at home can still complete the homework!

And as for the time commitment for students, doing one activity on the card should take about a minute. They can do one activity on the card per night or per week…or if they’re really into it, they can complete all four at the same time. The preschool cards also aid in carryover of skills as it asks them to find the concepts around the house. The activities on the card are split into general skill levels - there are two preschool sets, an early elementary set, and a late elementary set.

The preschool sets have pictures and target: categories, basic concepts, numbers, and colors; pronouns, actions, what doesn’t belong, and functions. The lower elementary set utilizes some pictures and targets: possessives, past tense, inferences, opposites; while the upper elementary cards do not have pictures and target: analogies, multiple meaning words, conjunctions, synonyms.

If you’re interested in this Spanish homework for yourself, check it out in my TeachersPayTeachers store here.