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
After addition, it would be fair to say that subtraction is the basic of arithmetic operations. Indeed, many students learn the two concepts of adding (addition) and “taking away” (subtraction) together. Of course, it’s usual for students to begin by learning how to do simple subtractions such 3 minus 2, 4 minus 3, 5 minus 2, etc., and then gradually progress towards being able to subtract numbers with multiple digits and carrying numbers between columns. High quality teaching is obviously one of the main foundation stones to this learning process, but regular practice is also very important.
While repetition and practice are of course important, it’s also certainly true that too much repetition can bore even the most diligent student. In the old days, many teachers weren’t too concerned about this issue – as long as the students were doing the work required of them, the teachers knew they were learning, and were therefore satisfied. Teaching has fortunately progressed considerably since those days. Nowadays teachers generally actively seek out interesting classroom activities for their students, because they know that such activities can be very effective in encouraging learning. One particular activity that many teachers are using in their classes, is bingo.
Bingo is ideally suited to use in math classes; it’s almost infinitely adaptable, it’s extremely easy to learn and play, and you don’t need expensive resources or materials. Educational variants of bingo are very similar to the traditional game of bingo, however bingo cards containing items relating to the subject of the lesson are used, instead of ordinary numbered bingo cards. Obviously in the case of subtraction, the items on the cards would be subtraction problems, and students would be required to write in their answers to these, rather than simply crossing items off the card.
The only thing that I haven’t yet explained is where teachers can obtain their subtraction bingo cards. The answer is a bit of a surprise for many teachers: they simply print them from your computer! With the help of some affordable and easy-to-use bingo card maker software, teachers can print unlimited bingo cards on any subject that they want.
By: Sunil Tanna
