Most adults are familiar with the game of bingo. Most of us have either played it ourselves, or at least seen it played. For those few people who have not, the rules are simple and easily learned – you are given a bingo card which is printed with a grid of numbers, and cross off squares as the numbers are called out by the bingo caller – the goal is to be the first person to achieve a winning pattern of crossed out squares (the exact definition of the a winning pattern varies depending on the variant of the game being played).
One thing that you may not have considered however is because bingo is so simple, it can be played by children, and with just a few modifications can easily be adapted into a powerful but flexible learning aid. Many teachers have noticed this (not to mention the fact that bingo does not require expensive materials or specialist resources), and thus have introduced variants of the game into their classrooms. Today bingo is being used to teach a variety of K-12 school subjects including English (vocabulary, reading, etc.), math, foreign languages, and even science and history.
In most classroom variants of bingo, the game is played using bingo cards printed with items chosen by teacher. Additionally, game play may be modified somewhat. For example, in a vocabulary version of bingo, the bingo cards contain words that the teacher wants students to learn, the teacher calls out definitions of words rather than the words themselves, and the students must match the definitions to the words. Similar ideas can be used for reading practise, math problems, and foreign languages (calling out words in one language and require students to match printed words in another).
The main requirement for all these educational variants of bingo is the ability for the teacher to give each student a bingo card with items appropriate for the particular lesson. Fortunately this is quite easy – a PC and some bingo cards generator software can print a set of bingo cards containing whatever types of items the teacher wants, in just a few minutes.
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
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
