Many of us, perhaps most of adults, have played bingo at one point or another in their lives. Maybe only once or twice, but nevertheless we know the rules – get a bingo card, check off items from your card as they are called out, and try to be the first person to shout out “Bingo!” if you achieve the winning pattern (a line of five items in any direction in most variants of the game, but sometimes other shapes or patterns may be used).
One thing that you may not have thought about, is how bingo cards are created. This is because, for most us, when we played the game, we were simply given a bingo card that was already printed with numbers, and creating a unique bingo card for each player was simply somebody else’s problem.
Today, you will find however that themed versions of bingo are growing in popularity. At Christmas, on July 4th, Halloween, Easter and other holidays, many people like to organize games based around the particular holiday in question. In this case, the bingo cards are in fact printed with words or phrases relating to the particular holiday. Similarly, more and more teachers are now using bingo as a classroom activity in a diverse range of subjects including K-12 Reading lessons, ESL (English as a Second Language), math, science, foreign languages and more – and in this case, bingo cards containing items appropriate for the particular lesson are used.
So how are these custom bingo cards prepared? One possibility is of course to do so manually – a person could prepare bingo cards using pen and paper, or even a word processor, but it would be a very time consuming process. The main alternative is to instead using special bingo card maker software – you enter a list of possible items, specify how many cards you want, click a button and you’re done.
By: Sunil Tanna
The ability to tell the time is one of those things that most adults take for granted. I mean by this that when you glance at a clock or see a time written down, comprehending what time of day it indicates doesn’t seem to involve any obvious mental effort. Nevertheless we aren’t born with this ability, and whether or not you remember learning it, the chances are that you first learned to tell the time when in school.
Learning to tell the time, like many other things taught in K12 schools, requires a combination of good teaching and of course practice. It is for this reason that today’s teachers are always on the look out for classroom activities which are stimulating for their students and will encourage learning. One such activity that has greatly grown in popularity in recent years (in terms of the K12 curriculum in general, and telling the time lessons in particular), is bingo.
In order to play telling the time bingo, each student is first given their own bingo card. The key difference however from traditional bingo is that the student’s bingo cards are printed with times of the day (e.g. “4:20″ or “1:45″) instead of numbers. The teacher then acts as bingo caller, and reads out different times, and students mark the corresponding squares off their cards. So, for example, when the teacher says “quarter to two”, students will need to locate the square on their bingo card containing “1:45″. It is of course also possible to vary the game play, for example, the teacher could use either or both of 12 and 24 hour clocks, or the teacher could hold up a clock at the front of the class (set to the appropriate time) instead of reading out times. Whichever variant you play, the objective of the game is for students to mark off a line of five items from their card, either vertically, horizontally or diagonally – and the first student to do so, is the winner.
If this sounds like a worthwhile activity, you will of course need to get some bingo cards printed with different times of day. Probably the simplest and cheapest way to obtain them is to simply printed them yourself using your PC. Get some bingo card creator software and you can easily print out bingo cards in any quantity that you might want. What’s more, doing the job yourself let you to customize the cards content, so the cards can be used not only for telling the time lessons, but any other subject that you feel appropriate too.
By: Sunil Tanna
