Most teachers are always looking for challenging and engaging things for their students to do in class. Activities that encourage participation in class discussions are always especially welcome. Ideally, activities in the classroom will also be fun, which is one of the reasons that games are popular, although of course we must never forget that the purpose behind all these activities is to encourage and aid learning.
However, being interesting and educational alone is not enough. An activity must also be suitable to suit different lesson plans, different ages of students, and of course different school subjects. Furthermore, in today’s educational environment, cost considerations must necessarily play a role: teachers cannot and are not willing to spend money on expensive materials that can only be used rarely, or even once.
One idea worth considering is bingo. The basic idea is to play the game using specially prepared bingo cards that contain items related to the theme. For example, in a chemistry class, you might use the names of chemical elements, compounds, or processes. In a math class, you can use math problems. In a geography class, you can use the names of countries, states, provinces, cities, rivers, or mountains. And in a foreign language class, you can play bingo using words from the French, German or Spanish vocabulary that the students are learning.
The beauty of bingo is that you can adapt the game to almost any subject or age range of students. Also, you can play the game in different ways: you can play a “normal” game with the teacher as the caller, you can make the teacher say “clues” instead of the items on the cards, you can ask the students to explain the items as they cross them off their bingo cards, or you could even have class discussions during the game after each item is called.
Bingo also supports the cost constraints that today’s teachers must work under – you can simply print the bingo cards from your computer instead of shipping for expensive supplies. There are two main ways to do that: either you can download free educational bingo printables from the internet (available in a variety of themes), or you can purchase inexpensive bingo card printing software (which will allow you to print bingo cards on any topic , whenever you want). Plus, if you play bingo regularly, you can even save on your printing costs – just print once on good quality paper or cardstock, use the school laminator on these, and when playing in class, students can put counters on top. the squares of the bingo cards instead of writing on them.
