Science has an image of being about theories, laws and mathematical formulas. As a result, we don’t always think about studying science subjects, we can easily forget they also involve learning many facts and details. Chemistry is in fact well known for the amount of facts that students studying the subject need to be familiar with. This includes, for example, the names, symbols and properties of elements, chemical formula, and of course the terminology that chemists uses to describe various chemical reactions and processes.
Students who don’t know the key facts of chemistry (such as names of elements, etc.) will of course struggle with the subject, so good teachers tend to seek out ways to assist their students in learning these essentials. Fun, engaging and enjoyable classroom activities offer one of the best ways to learn, so many teachers actively seek out new activities for their students. Educational games turn out to be one of the most popular, and effective, classroom activities. And, one of the most popular educational games is in fact bingo.
Bingo is an almost ideal game for educational situations. Partly this is because almost everybody already knows how to play the game, and those few who don’t can quickly learn how, as well as the fact that the game can be adapted to teaching almost any subject, including chemistry, by using bingo cards printed with squares containing the items being taught, instead of numbers. Also, the game of bingo has the advantage that it does not require expensive specialist materials, which is very important given the financial constraint that teachers work under these days.
To play bingo in the classroom, the teacher plays the part of the bingo caller, each student is given a bingo card, and then you play the game. Of course, the teacher has the option of modifying the style of play if she wants, for example by encouraging classroom dicussion after items are called out, or by requiring students to describe the items that they have marked off from their cards.
Of course, if you’d like to play chemistry bingo in class, you will need to get some bingo cards printed with items related to chemistry. The easiest way for a teacher to obtain such bingo cards, is simply by printing them from her computer. This is simple enough even for computer novices, because of the availability of ready-to-use bingo printables that are available online, and of easy-to-use bingo card printing software, which can print any types of bingo cards that you might need.
By: Sunil Tanna
Phonics is a popular method of teaching children to read that is based around the child learning to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters. For example, the child would learn that the hard “k” sound is associated with the letters “c”, “k” or “ck”. To be fair, using phonics as a method of teaching reading has not been without controversy, particularly in the United States of America, at least since the mid 19th century, and especially since the reemergence of phonics in the 1950s.
Those teachers who do use phonics, generally use them in a variety of different classroom activities, not just when students are reading from books or writing. For example, phonics and phonics-based skills can be incorporated into many different classroom activities and educational games, including, for example, bingo.
Phonics bingo is played like the traditional game of bingo: Each player (student) is given a card containing a five by five grid of squares, and aims to mark of a line of items (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) in response to items called out by the bingo caller (teacher). The different however between phonics bingo and traditional bingo, is that the cards, instead of being printed with numbers, are printed with words appropriate to the subject of the lesson. Additionally, game play may be modified in a variety of different ways.
Some ideas for phonetics bingo include:
1. Partial word bingo – The teacher says something like “find the word with ‘pin’ in it”, in response to which the students would have to find “spin”.
2. Blending bingo – The teacher reads out a word slowly, for example “sss-nnn-aaa-p”, and the students must find the corresponding word.
3. Rhyming bingo – The teacher reads out a word, and students need to find the word that rhymes with it.
4. Silent E bingo – The teacher reads out a word like “pin” and asks what what word you would get by adding an E.
It should also be remembered that phonics is not a complete solution to learning reading. Students must also learn to recognize some common words which can not be sounded out (the most common list of such words is known as Dolch Sight Words). Many teachers also emphasize learning to sight read other common words (such as “is” or “it”) as this can improve reading fluency. Therefore as well as playing phonics bingo, you can also play sight word bingo in class.
By: Sunil Tanna
Most people are familiar with the game of bingo. The idea of the game is simple: each player is given a bingo worksheet (or “bingo card” or “bingo board”) containing a grid of squares (each square usually contains a different number), and the goal is to cross out numbers as they are called out by the bingo caller, hopefully being the first to achieve a winning pattern or line (what is considered a winning pattern may vary depending on the rules being used).
One thing that you may not know however is that there are many variations on the basic game of bingo, and these have been applied for a variety of educational purposes. Bingo is in fact an excellent tool that can be used to help teaching reading, vocabulary, math, science and many other K-12 subjects, and also is of use in teaching English as Second Language (”ESL”).
The common theme in most educational variants of bingo is a requirement for custom bingo worksheets. This is because the bingo worksheets are printed with items chosen by the teacher and specific to the particular subject in question. For example, in a game of math bingo, the worksheets might be printed with numbers that are the answers to math problems called out by the teacher, in a game of foreign language bingo, the bingo worksheets might be printed out with French or Spanish words (the teacher makes the bingo calls in English), and so on. You might assume that creating custom bingo cards for every student in a class is a lot of time-consuming preparation work for teachers, but you would be wrong – it’s actually very easy to print custom bingo cards with the help from a computer and some bingo worksheets generator software.
By: Sunil Tanna
