Most of us know how to play bingo. So the way to play bingo is probably already familiar to you, 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 says the items printed on the worksheets in a random order.
4. As items are named, players cross off 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).
Although, of course, the standard game of bingo is well known to many people and many play it as a leisure activity, what is less 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 containing numbers, the teacher creates, before class, worksheets containing elements 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, the worksheets may be printed with Spanish or French words, which the students must match with the calls made in English by the teacher. There really are almost endless variations possible, and innovative teachers are inventing new ones all the time.
You may think this is all very well, but where can you get the special personalized 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 it easy to print worksheets on whatever topic the teacher chooses.