It’s impossible to overemphasize the importance of students acquiring a good understanding of mathematics. Maths is not only one of the most important school subjects that students study, but it also underpins a variety of other academic disciplines, is a foundation for countless aspects of modern life (including business, commerce, finance, science and technology), and is an essential skill for ordinary everyday living. The study of maths begins with basic numeracy and then arithmetic; recognizing numbers, learning to count, and then progressing to adding, subtracting, multiplying and division.
Like many things in life, students’ skills at maths tend to improve fastest when they are practised regularly. In short, practice makes perfect. However, while it’s certainly true that regularly practising an activity can help a student to improve, teachers also need to remember that too much repetition can eventually become boring for even the most diligent student. It’s common knowledge that bored students tend not to learn very well, and therefore many teachers are always on the look-out for interesting new classroom activities. One such activity that is increasingly popular with many maths teachers is in fact bingo.
In maths bingo, each student is given a printed bingo card containing mathematical problems. The teacher takes the role of bingo caller, and calls out these problems in a random order. If the problem appears on a student’s bingo card, the student must try to fill in the correct answer, and the winner is the first student who fills out a line of 5 correct answers and calls “Bingo!”.
Teachers can also adapt the game for different situations. For example, you could play in teams, you could solve each problem on the blackboard before moving on to the next item, or you could simply vary the type of problems on the bingo cards. There are in fact an almost endless variety of ways that the game of bingo can be used in a maths class, and it is this flexibility that makes the game attractive to so many teachers.
If you plan to play maths bingo, you will need to prepare some suitable bingo cards printed with suitable problems. There’s no need to worry about how to obtain them, since can easily print them from your computer, either by using free ready-made maths bingo printables (downloadable from the Internet), or by getting some bingo card creating software.
By: Sunil Tanna
An increasing number of non-native speakers of English around the world wish to learn the language. This is no doubt for a variety of different reasons, and includes people who wish to come to a largely English-speaking country (such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland) to live, work, study, or just visit, and people who wish to learn English for professional reasons. The professional demand for English comes from increasing ubiquity of the Internet (as you no doubt are aware, English has become the dominant language for online communications), and English’s status as a global lingua franca of business, commerce, diplomacy, science, technology, and aviation.
With the demand to learn “English as a Second Language” (ESL) or “English as a Foreign Language” (EFL), also comes a demand for teachers of that subject. For native English speakers, including young people such as recent university graduates, going abroad to “Teach English as a Foreign Language” (TEFL), provides an excellent opportunity to travel and see the world.
TEFL teachers aim is to provide their students with a good understanding of both spoken and written activities. Learning is facilitated by a variety of classroom activities, including both speaking and reading English. Ideally such activities will enjoyable and engaging for the students, as well as being educational.
One game that is very well suited to be used as a classroom activity is bingo. The game is very easy to learn and play, doesn’t have complicated rules, doesn’t require expensive equipment, and can in fact be adapted to teaching many different topics.
In English class the game can be played:
1. Ahead of time, before the class, the teacher should prepare bingo cards for each student. The cards should contain the types of items that form the subject of the lesson – for example, they might numbers, be they might also be dates, times or English words. A particularly popular choice is “sight words”, which are common English words which students need to be able to instantly recognize in order to read English fluently. Anyway, these cards can be prepared by the teacher simply printing them from her computer – this is easy since ready-made free bingo printables can be download from the Internet, or the teacher can purchase low cost bingo card printing software which will allow her to print unlimited quantities of bingo cards on any subject at all.
2. At the start of the class, each student is given their own bingo card. You can then play the game normally, with the teacher playing the part of the bingo caller. Students can either mark off the items from their cards as they are called, or cover the squares on the cards with a coin or counter if you wish to re-use the cards in a subsequent lesson.
Playing bingo in class can be a lot of fun – but it’s also excellent practice for learning English – provided of course that the game is conducted entirely in English! Smart teachers can also adapt the game with their own twists that enhance the educational element of the game – for example, they might require that the student who claims “Bingo” to read out (in English) all the items that they have marked off.
By: Sunil Tanna
