3 Ways to Use Bingo in Your Classroom

Everyone loves bingo- but I like to mix up how we play it.

What I think of as a traditional way to play: Cut up one of the bingo cards and mix up all the pieces. Choose one from the stack to display under the document camera. Students will answer that question on their board. You can laminate their cards, put them in sheet protectors so students can use markers, or simply print them out and let students actually write on them. You can do the perimeter of the board to get a bingo, a blackout where all the pieces are filled in correctly, and your typical 4 or 5 in a row vertical, horitzonal, or diagonal.
Set a timer for 10 min and have your students answer as many questions on the bingo as possible. When the timer is over, pull out cards as I mentioned in idea #1 where you would display under the doc camera. If they have answered the one you display correctly, they get to mark that one on their board.
Have students swap papers with students- kinda like ‘find someone who’- and set a timer for say 15 min. or so. When students swap papers with someone they have to each answer a bingo question on their peer’s paper. When they swap back, they check other’s answers! This is great because when I do ‘find somone who’ they don’t really stress about the accuracy of the work. They mostly want to get every answer filled in, right? But for a bingo, accuracy matters!

Simple Prize Ideas for Bingo