Most people are familiar with the game of bingo and how to play it. It may be that we have played the game at some point in our lives ourselves, or it may be that we have simply seen others play it and learnt that way – the rules are that easy to pick-up. One thing however that many people are not aware of, is that bingo can be adapted for use in schools and education, and these modified variants of the game, can be useful classroom tool.
The beauty of bingo in the classroom is that it provides an interesting and stimulating activity for students, but can easily be adapted for teaching almost any subject, whether that be reading, English, math, a foreign language such as French, German, Italian or Spanish, or almost anything else.
Although in some cases it may be necessary for the teacher to vary the rules of the game slightly, the main change in educational versions of bingo is the content of the bingo cards. In the traditional game of bingo, the bingo cards are printed with numbers, however in classroom versions of the game, the cards are instead printed with items of the teachers choice – these can be words, phrases, math problems or anything else that the teacher chooses.
Using these custom bingo cards, the game is then played. In an introductory level reading class, students may simply be required to find the matching item when a word is called out by the teacher. However, in a math class, the students may be required to correctly solve the problems in a square in order to mark it off, and in a language class, the cards might be printed with words in French or Spanish, and the students might be required to find the matching word when the teacher makes bingo calls in English.
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
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
