How to Play Pasapalabra - Bilingually Yours

Pasapalabra is an alphabet game that can be used to review vocabulary, initial letter sounds, and listening comprehension. It’s a fun and easy activity to have up your sleeve for your Spanish class, bilingual classroom, or at home.

What is Pasapalabra?

The game is based on a television show known in Spanish speaking countries as Pasapalabra and in the UK as The Alphabet Game.

How do you play?

Going in alphabetical order, players are given a definition and must guess the word that begins with that letter.

The ‘host’ says, “Empieza por la A. Es un líquido que bebemos cada día,” and the player guesses “agua.” Then “Empieza por la B,” followed by the definition for that word, and so on.

If a player can’t think of the word, they say pasapalabra and they move on to the next letter, but they can come back to the unguessed word at the end of the round and try again.

The goal is to guess all the words going around the alphabet.

How to Play Pasapalabra with Kids

If you would rather play verbally, have one student read the definitions while a second student guesses the words. If you would rather have it written out, you can give students the same definitions on a worksheet then have students write their answers.

Regardless of how you play, you can choose for students to guess as a team, going around the classroom, in pairs, or individually. Pasapalabra is adaptable to any number of variations -which is why it’s a great tool to have up your sleeve!

What do I need to play Pasapalabra?

You’ll need an alphabet wheel and a list of words and definitions for each round of the game you would like to play. You can check out my sample Pasapalabra printable available at the bottom of this post.

What do I say?

The phrases you’ll use for the game are:

Empieza por la ____ (It starts with ____) and follow this with the definition of the target word, or;

Contiene la _____ (It contains _____) followed by the definition of the target word.

Variations

The beauty of Pasapalabra is you can use it as a go-to review game similar to Jeopardy. You can focus on a specific topic or unit of study (like food, nature, or science) and increase or decrease the level of difficulty for your students by how complex your definitions are. I’ve seen versions of Pasapalabra for animals, countries, initial letter sounds, science terms, and more.

Additional variations include:

Words must start with each letter of the alphabet (Empieza con la __ )
Words must contain a letter of the alphabet (Contiene la __ )
Limiting the number of times a player can say pasapalabra
Introducing a time limit (You have 3 minutes to guess all the words)
Having older students write definitions to create their own versions of Pasapalabra

Again, this depends on the level and temperament of your students. Personally I would start without a time limit. I would also limit the number of times students can say pasapalabra to three or less.

The Alphabet Wheel

Keep in mind that another way to increase or decrease the level of difficulty is by the letters that you include on your alphabet wheel. The Spanish game show version includes ñ, but the words contain ñ instead of starting with it. (Think uña, niño, pañuelo.)

For younger kids, you might want to take away the ñ all together since there aren’t that many words to choose from. While you’re at it, you may also consider removing words with k, x, and w. You can have them on the wheel, but choose not to include the definitions for those letters in the version that you play.

Conversely, you could also add digraphs ll, ch, and rr with the idea that words would contain those letters instead of starting with them (calle, carro, mucho).

Give it a try!

Pasapalabra is a great catch-all review game that kids will look forward to playing. If you want to give it a try, check out my Pasapalabra template to get started.