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
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
