Most of us tend to think of bingo as a game played as a leisure activity, mostly by older people. However, it is also the case that variations on the standard game of bingo are now being used by many teachers and educators. Bingo has in fact been applied to teaching a wide variety of different subjects including reading, English, foreign languages such as French, Spanish, German and Italian, and math, science, history and geography.
Educational variants of bingo are generally played with the teacher taking the part of bingo caller. The students are each given a bingo card or worksheet, containing a selection of items from a list created in advance of class by the teacher. The particular items that appear on the bingo worksheets are of course specific to the particular subject being taught.
The class then plays bingo. In some subjects, for example if teacher younger kids the alphabet or to recognize Dolch sight words, the teacher may simply call out items that are printed on the bingo worksheets, and students need to find matches on their cards. In other cases, the teacher may call out a clue or question (such as a Spanish word, or a math problem) and students have to find to solve the problem and find the match (such as the English translation of the Spanish word, or the answer to the math problem).
Of course the key requirement to play any of these versions of bingo in a classroom is a set of suitable bingo worksheets. Obviously it would not be a good use of the teacher’s time to spend a long time manually writing out bingo worksheets. Likewise, while it may be possible to buy preprinted educational bingo worksheets, this can get expensive quite quickly if many different worksheets are needed, and in any case, preprinted worksheets may not contain the exact items that the teacher wants for his or her class. The best answer is to use a computer and some bingo worksheet generator software – this way the teacher can quickly and easily prepare custom bingo worksheets whenever they are needed.
By: Sunil Tanna
Sep 23
