I recently wrote an article discussing the importance of teachers using get to know you activities to reduce classroom management problems and improve academic achievement. In that article I shared one of my favorite get to know you activities that I call the “Interview and Introduction”. In this activity students answer a series of questions about themselves on an index card, the teacher then redistributes those cards and then has the students walk around the room “interviewing” each other until they find the person whose card they have. Students then “introduce” each other.
One of the great things about this activity is that the teacher gets to collect the cards and use the information on those cards for follow-up get to know you activities.
In this article I’d like to share with you one of those follow-up get to know you activities. I call it…Get To Know You Bingo.
It’s simple and fun…
First, I take the index cards I collected from the “Interview and Introduction” activity and use the information on them to create bingo cards. I simply go through each index card a place one thing about each student in each bingo square. Each student then gets their own bingo sheet and walks around the room trying to find which of their classmates matches up with which bingo square. When students find a match they get their classmate to sign that particular box. Five signatures in a row wins Bingo!
Of course, it is much easier to create bingo cards if you have some type of bingo card creator software. However, even if you do not own any software to create bingo cards, the time it takes is well worth it! Students are up and moving about the classroom and having lots of fun, but more importantly, students form and build upon their relationships with one another and this will have a huge impact on both classroom management and academic achievement throughout the school year.
By: Adam Waxler
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
At the start of a school year, or in an event such as seminar or workshop, it can be helpful for the teacher or organizer to find a fun activity that will facilitate introductions. One such activity that is definitely worth considering is the game of ice breaker bingo. Ice breaker bingo is in reality at least two different games – both variants of the classic game of bingo, and the teacher or organizer should select the most appropriate version of ice breaker bingo depending on the age, confidence level and English-language skills of the players (or students).
1. In both versions of the game, each player is given their own bingo card. The objective of the game is to be the first player to achieve a line of five marked off items on your card, whether that line is horizontal, vertical or diagonal.
2. In the simpler version of ice breaker bingo, the bingo cards contain the names of members of the group – a different name in each square. What happens is the teacher (or organizer) goes around the group asking people to stand up one at a time, telling the others a little bit about themselves, and finish by stating their name. The other players can then mark that name off their card, and the first player to achieve a line of five can call a bingo – however their bingo only counts if they can correctly identify the people corresponding to each of the names in their winning line.
3. In the more complex version of the game, the squares of the bingo cards are printed with descriptions or activities (e.g. “owns a cat”, “can play piano”, “is a vegetarian”). The players then circulate among themselves trying to find others who match these descriptions, and, when they find a match, they write that person’s name in the square. The catch is that each name may only be used once per card, and that of course encourages the players to meet and talk with as many other members of the group as they can.
By: Sunil Tanna
