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 particularly welcome. Ideally, classroom activities are also fun – which is one of the reasons why games are so popular – although of course we must never forget that the purpose of all these activities is to encourage and support learning.
However, being interesting and educational is not enough. An activity must also be suitable to be adapted to different lesson plans, different ages of students and of course different school subjects. In addition, in today’s educational environment, cost considerations must inevitably play a role: teachers cannot and do not want to spend money on expensive materials that can only be used infrequently or only once.
One idea worth considering is bingo. The basic idea is to play the game with specially prepared bingo cards containing themed items. For example, in chemistry class, you might use the names of elements, compounds, or chemical processes. In a math class, you could use math problems. In geography class, you might use the names of countries, states, provinces, cities, rivers, or mountains. And in a foreign language class, you could play bingo using words from the French, German, or Spanish vocabulary that students are learning.
The beauty of bingo is that you can adapt the game to almost any subject or age group of students. In addition, you can play the game in different ways: you could play a “normal” game with the teacher as the caller, you could have the teacher call out “hints” instead of the items on the cards, you could ask the students for the items explain as they check them off their bingo cards, or you could even have in-game class discussions after each item has been called.
Bingo is also compatible with the cost constraints that today’s teachers have to work under: you can simply print out the bingo cards from your computer instead of sending them in for expensive supplies. There are two main ways to do this: either you can download ready-made free educational bingo printables from the Internet (available on a variety of subjects), or you can purchase inexpensive bingo card printing software (which allows you to print bingo cards on any subject, whenever you want). If you play bingo regularly, you can even save on your printing costs – just print once on good quality paper or card, use the school’s laminator on it, and when you play in class, students can put counters over the squares on the bingo cards instead of writing on them.
Thanks to Sunil Tanna | #Educational #bingo #teachers
