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 welcome. Ideally, classroom activities would also be fun – this is one of the reasons games are so popular – although, of course, we must never forget that the purpose of all such activities is to encourage and aid learning.
However, being interesting and educational is not enough in and of itself. The activity must also be suitable to adapt to different lesson plans, different ages of students and, of course, different subjects. Moreover, in today’s educational environment, cost considerations must necessarily play a role: teachers are unable and unwilling to spend money on expensive materials that can only be used rarely, or even only once.
One idea worth considering is bingo. The basic idea is that you play the game with specially prepared bingo cards that contain items related to the theme. For example, in a chemistry class, you might use the names of elements, compounds, or chemical processes. In math class, you might use math problems. In a geography class, you can use the names of countries, states, provinces, cities, rivers, or mountains. And in foreign language class, you can play bingo using words from the French, German, or Spanish vocabulary the 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 several different ways: you can play a “normal” game with the teacher as the caller, you can ask the teacher for “clues” instead of the items on the cards, you can ask the students to explain the items as they check them off their bingo cards, or you can even have class discussions during the game after each item is called out.
Bingo also conforms to the cost constraints that today’s educators must work under: you simply print out bingo cards from your computer instead of sending them out for expensive supplies. There are two main ways to do this: either you can download free ready-made educational bingo printing materials from the Internet (available in a wide variety of subjects), or you can purchase inexpensive bingo card printing software (which will allow you to print bingo cards on any topic, whenever you want). Furthermore, if you find yourself playing bingo on a regular basis, you can even save on printing costs—just print once on high-quality paper or card, use the school’s laminator on it, and when you play in class, students can put counters on the squares on the bingo cards instead of writing on them.