Bingo!

If you have been reading my blogs this term you may remember that I wrote about a great family night out playing Bingo at the local bowls club. if you missed it, you can read this blog here.

Bingo has always been one of my favourite maths games to play with F–2 students in the classroom. It provides the perfect mix of fun and purposeful practice. At the beginning of the year I show the class how to play ‘regular’ Bingo. I spend time modelling how to choose numbers, listen to the ‘caller’ and place (transparent) counters on the numbers if they are on their card (covertly I’m getting them to work on writing and reading numbers).
Bingo then becomes one of my ‘evergreen’ games. Depending on the skill I want my students to be working on, I use a different variation of the game. By the time I am introducing these variations, my students are very familiar with the logistics and rules of Bingo, thus reducing the cognitive load of learning a new game. This allows us to get straight to the maths.

I have a class set of laminated blank Bingo cards and I invite students to select and record nine numbers.

I might ask them to select numbers between 0-20 or 0-100 depending on my foci (covertly I am working on the idea of ‘between’). The beauty of Bingo is I can easily change the foci to suit what I have been teaching.
Some of the foci I have used are:

Before Bingo

If I call out ‘10’ and you have the number before 10 (i.e., 9) you can place a counter on ‘9’.

After Bingo

If I call out ‘45’ and you have the number after 45 (i.e., ‘46’) you can place a counter on 46.

Doubles Bingo

If I call out ‘12’ and you have the number that is double 12 (i.e., 24) you can place a counter on 24.

Renaming Bingo

I rename the numbers in a non-standard manner for example, for 45, I could say: ‘3 tens and 15 ones’. Students are required to calculate the number and if they have ‘45’ they can place a counter on that number.

Ten More Bingo

If I call out ‘67’ and you have the number 10 more than 67 (i.e., 77) you can place a counter on 77.

Here are some enabling and extending prompts you might like to try!

ENABLING PROMPTS

I might allow some students to have a 100s chart, or a calculator to support them, depending on my foci. I also encourage students to have a piece of paper next to them to record the number called. They write the number, for example, they might record ‘24’ and then ‘25’ next to it, in an ‘After Bingo’ game. Then they have time to search for ‘25’ without having to hold both numbers in their working memory.

EXTENDING PROMPTS
I often invite ‘guest callers’ into my Bingo Game. This allows the ‘guest caller’ (aka a student) to read the numbers (or rename them if this is our foci), allowing me to purposefully wander around the room taking anecdotal notes on how different students are handling the particular foci. I might record something like: ‘Xavier needs more work on 2-digit doubling’ and that then becomes a future teaching foci. Formative assessment…tick!

All of my students love Bingo. You can hear a pin drop in the room when you are rolling the barrel, waiting for the next number to pop out! I encourage you to give Bingo a go in your class! I have purchased quite a few Bingo barrels and while you can easily roll two 9 sided dice to generate the numbers, the barrel is so much more engaging! This is my current barrel, which I purchased for $10 from Target. You can order it online here.