While the game of bingo is usually thought of a leisure activity, and indeed it is often played as such, it is also true that variations on the standard game of bingo are often used by teachers and educators. Indeed versions of bingo have been applied to teaching of K-12 subjects such as reading, vocabulary and math, to teaching foreign languages such as Spanish, French, German and Italian, and in corporate training environments, for example in safety courses.
Some examples of educational variants of bingo include:
* Sight Word Bingo – This is used to help teach children reading skills, particularly of sight words (such as words on the Dolch sight word list), which are words that students can not easily sound out but most learn to recognize. The teacher calls out a word, and the students look for the corresponding word printed on their bingo worksheet (or “bingo card”).
* Math Bingo – This version of bingo is played using bingo worksheets printed with numbers. However, these are not the standard numbers used on bingo cards, but instead are the answers to math problems called out by the teacher. The problems can be as hard or as easy as the teacher chooses, and this method can be used for a variety of math topics include additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions, fractions, decimals, rounding, etc.
* Foreign Language Bingo – The bingo worksheets are printed with words in the particular foreign language, say Spanish, and the teacher makes bingo calls in English. Students must translate the bingo calls, and then find the corresponding square on their bingo worksheet.
There are of course many other educational variations of bingo, and innovative educators are sure to come up with yet more ideas on this theme. The key requirement of course to using any of these versions of bingo in the classroom is having a set of bingo worksheets with the appropriate items for the particular lesson. In some cases it may be possible to buy such worksheets preprinted, but they can be expensive, and of course preprinted items do not allow the teacher to choose exactly the items they should contain. A cheaper and more flexible approach may therefore be to use a computer and some bingo worksheet maker software – that way the teacher can easily print custom bingo worksheets whenever they are needed.
By S. Tanna. Download and try out for free the bingo worksheet maker software at http://www.bingocardprinter.com/ Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/k-12-education-articles/bingo-worksheets-maker-1082503.html
