Most of us know how to play bingo. So the way to play bingo is probably familiar by now, but if not, here’s a quick rundown:
1. Each player is a bingo worksheet (also known as a “bingo card” or “bingo board”).
2. The bingo sheet contains a grid of squares. Each square usually contains a different number.
3. The bingo caller calls out the items printed on the worksheets in a random order.
4. As the items are called out, players cross off the items on their worksheets. The winner is the first player to achieve a winning pattern of crossed out items on their worksheet (in different versions of the game, different winning patterns can be used).
While of course the standard game of bingo is well known to many people and is played as a leisure activity by many, what is not so well known is that modified versions of bingo can be of great use in education. In fact, bingo is becoming more and more common in classrooms and can be used as teaching aids in various K-12 subjects such as reading, vocabulary, math, foreign languages, and even science and history, as well as in education. of adults. , for example, in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes.
The common element in most educational versions of bingo is the use of modified bingo chips. Instead of the standard worksheets that contain numbers, the teacher creates, before class, worksheets that contain items chosen for the lesson. In math class, the items may still be numbers, but the numbers are the answers to the problems posed by the teacher. In a language class, worksheets may be printed with words in Spanish or French, which students must match to the calls made in English by the teacher. There really are almost infinite possible variations, and innovative teachers are inventing new ones all the time.
You may think this is all very well, but where can you get special custom bingo worksheets? Obviously, it would not be a good use of a busy teacher’s time to spend a lot of time manually preparing a worksheet for each student. Fortunately, there is an answer: a PC and some bingo worksheet creation software can make the job of printing out worksheets on whatever subject the teacher chooses easy.