Bingo is an increasingly popular classroom activity with many teachers. This is because these teachers realize that as well as being a lot of fun for their students, the game is perfectly suited to educational use, including in the K-12 environment. This is because bingo is very easy to learn and play, highly flexible and adaptable to different topics and subjects, and importantly given the financial constraints that many teachers work under, not requiring of specialist expensive resources or materials.
Although bingo can be used in teaching many different subjects and topics, including math and arithmetic, telling the time, or even geography, history or science, one area in which the game is especially popular, is teaching reading. When teaching reading the key aspect of the game is that each student is given a bingo card printed with words (or perhaps phrases), and although (as in standard bingo), the objective remains to be the first player to get a line of five items horizontally, vertically or diagonally, game play can be adapted from simply calling out words (or writing them on the blackboard if the teacher prefers).
1. Sight Words – The teacher simply calls out words, and students must find the corresponding word on their cards. This variant is most popular with so-called “Sight Words” – words that can not be sounded out, but that students must master recognizing in order to achieve reading fluency.
2. Blending Bingo – The teacher says a word very slowly such as “sss-ppp-ooo-ttt” or “mmm-aaa-t” and the students must find the word on the card. The purpose being to help students practice “blending” letters to make words.
3. Partial Word Bingo – The teacher says something like “Find the word with ‘mile’ in it” and the student has to find “Smile”. You can also use beginnings of words (e.g. find the word beginning with “r”), word endings, or sounds in the middle of words.
4. Rhyming Bingo – The teacher says something like “Find the word that rhymes with ‘plot’” and the student has to find “slot”.
5. Silent E Bingo – Ahead of time the teacher prepares bingo cards using pairs of words with and without a silent E, for example “cap” and “cape”, or “hat” and “hate”. You then play normal bingo and students have to learn to recognize the differences between these similar words. A variation is to use only words without the final E, and when playing make bingo calls of the following form “When you add an E, the word would be ‘pine’”, in response to which clue the students needs to find the square containing “pin”.
By: Sunil Tanna
Educational bingo is increasingly popular as a classroom activity as more and more teachers are realizing that the game can easily be adapted to a variety of different lesson plans. Apart from the simple fact that students of all ages can enjoy the game, there are many other reasons by bingo is growing in popularity, not least the fact that it’s very inexpensive to play (important given the constraints that today’s teachers work under), but also the facts that game play mechanics can be modified to teaching pretty much any subject to any age range of students.
Bingo can play a role in teaching many different subjects, including math (the squares on bingo cards can be printed with math problems for which students must write in the answers rather than simply marking off squares), telling the time, geography, history, science, foreign languages, and yes, reading. In fact, bingo particularly excels in reading classes, and it is here that the game is most commonly encountered in schools.
In reading bingo, the game is played using the same basic game play mechanics as traditional bingo – the player’s (student’s) objective is to find a line of five matching items vertically, horizontally or diagonally as the items are announced by the bingo caller (teacher), however the bingo cards are printed with words instead of the usual numbers. These words can be sight words (words that students must learn to immediately recognize in order to achieve reading fluency), words that students are in the process of practicing this week, or they can be chosen specially in order to practice a variety of phonics games. Some examples of phonics games, include the teacher asking students to find rhymes, find a longer word that contains a shorter word or sound, find a word that the teacher reads out slowly (e.g. “fff-lll-aaa-p”) so that students must practice “blending” letters, and so on.
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
