5 x 5 Bingo Card Maker

You are about to make a 5 x 5 BINGO Card. In order to make your card, input 25 words or phases below that you would like to appear on your BINGO card and then click on "FREE BINGO SPACE!"

5 x 5 (25 Terms)

What Makes Bingo Fun?

As a teacher, you must have been constantly on the lookout to make your class fun and engaging without jeopardizing students' quality learning time. Well, what if there is a way to use just one activity that matches all of your requirements with different variations to reduce planning time? You can easily plan and play bingo activities in the classroom to introduce concepts, evaluate lessons, or review topics based on your lesson's objectives.

Using Bingo as a Learning Tool

The versatility of bingo is what makes it fun for students and teachers alike. Students can easily yet competitively play variations of bingo while you can save time integrating new activities each day in your planning. Here are some ideas for using bingo as a learning tool:

Plain Old Bingo

Just playing bingo for the actual game can be fun for students. You can jazz it up by replacing numbers with vocabulary words to review synonyms and antonyms. Similarly, you can write different years on the bingo cards and call out events instead of numbers so that students cross out the years in which the event took place. This activity is a fun way to revise before a test while also giving you a sense of students' preparation and where they need some assistance from you.

Matching Tasks

Instead of calling out the events discussed above, you can have some small cards printed separately with events written on them. Now divide your students into teams or pairs, ask them to match the events with the years, and place them on the bingo card. And voila! You have your unit review done with an interesting activity. You can perform this activity with younger kids to check their knowledge of analog and digital clocks.

Scavenger Hunt

Take the hands-on mode up a notch with this idea and see how much fun students have. Scavenger hunts are an incredible way to get students moving from their seats, but teachers can also integrate them into a lesson plan for introducing a topic.

Divide students into groups and give out a bingo card with some things written on it that are related to your topic and fill the rest of the boxes with random stuff. Now ask the groups to run around an allotted area and find as many things as possible in the next half an hour. For example, you can ask students to collect pebbles, sticks, etc., from the garden nearby. Once students have brought their collection and marked off the words on the card, you can then ask them to form sets of these objects and guess their topic.

Peer Review Activity

Give out a bingo card with questions written on them and small cards with answers corresponding with the boxes to each pair of students. One student will roll the dice and ask the question corresponding to the number from the other student. The student asking the question will then check the answer from the small cards and place it on the bingo card if correct. This activity will encourage students to be responsible for their learning and that of their peers, promoting teamwork.

Conclusion

Using bingo as a learning tool is an effective strategy to make boring lessons and unit reviews interesting. Besides that, it also saves time in planning and designing as all bingo cards follow a similar format regardless of the objective or the variation being played. The variety that simple bingo activities introduce and the engaging environment they create are what make bingo fun.