Christmas, December 25th, is of course the day on which Christians celebrate the birth of the savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Today, of course, Christmas is not only a Christian holiday, but is also an important secular holiday too, and an opportunity for many to take a break from work or school, and see family, friends and loved ones.
Family and community gathering, and of course the last days of a school term, provide a wonderful opportunity for fun-filled Christmas-themed activities, including, of course, games. One particular game that can be very easily adapted to have a Christmas theme, is bingo.
Christmas bingo is played just like a normal game of bingo, except, instead of using the normal bingo cards containing numbers, you use bingo cards printed with words or phrases related to Christmas – words such as “Advent”, “Bells”, “Card”, “Santa Claus”, or “Tree”. Of course it retains one of the best features of standard bingo – pretty much everyone knows how to play, and anyone who doesn’t, can learn the game very quickly indeed! You can also introduce a twist if you like – why not require each winner to do a forfeit such as sing a song, tell a joke, rub their tummy while patting their head, etc.
One thing you might be wondering is where to get Christmas-themed bingo cards. Actually this is pretty simple – you can download free printable materials from the Internet and use them, or you can use bingo card creation software to create your own customized bingo cards if you prefer.
By: Sunil Tanna
Pretty much everybody knows how to play bingo right? Each player gets a card containing a grid of numbers (usually a 5 by 5 grid with a special “free space” square in the middle), the bingo announcer calls out numbers in random order, plays check off the corresponding numbers from their bingo cards, and the first player to get an agreed upon pattern (usually a line of five in any direction regardless of whether it’s horizontal, vertical or diagonal), is a the winner. You can buy ready-made bingo cards, so why would anybody make to make their own bingo cards?
The answer lies in the fact that themed variants of the standard game have become massively more popular in the bingo cards. In themed versions of bingo, the bingo cards are not printed with numbers, but instead are printed with words, phrases, or even math problems.
Probably the most popular themed versions of the game are those based around particular holidays such as Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween or July 4th (US Independence Day). In these variants, they are printed with words or phrases relating to the particular holiday in question, so items like “Angel”, “Santa Claus” and “Yule” would be used for Christmas bingo, whereas as words like “Heart”, “Love” or “Romance” would be used for St. Valentine’s Day bingo.
Versions of bingo using custom bingo cards are also popular in education. Teachers can prepare them based around any subject or lesson plan, and can also vary game play, for example by calling out “clues” and requiring students to find the corresponding word or phrase. In language classes, bingo calls can be made in one language, and students required to match the corresponding word in another language.
In math classes, these can be printed with math problems in each square, and students can be required to write in the correct answer when an item is called, rather than merely tick off a square. Of course, even the standard game mechanics can be suitable for classroom use in the right situation – for example, an essential part of learning to read fluently is learning to quickly recognize common words (known as “sight words”) – and this can be practiced by playing sight word bingo.
By: Sunil Tanna
