Human Bingo

It appears as though I decided to focus this week's blogs around the idea of vocabulary. Today will follow in suit. This past year, one of my colleagues partnered up with my co teacher and I to create a fun activity to help as a review for a history unit on the enlightenment. As I am focusing on vocabulary, I now realize how easily this activity could be adapted to fit in with the vocab theme. Let me preface the activity by saying that our students had a lot of fun with this!

Human Bingo: This game requires a pretty big amount of open space. We were able to use the courtyard in front of our school area to draw the bingo board. Using sidewalk chalk, we drew on a 5x5 square board (25 boxes). I told another friend about this activity and she wasn't able to go outside, but she used electrical tape on the floor for the bingo boxes and taped down the words/terms in the squares. In each box, we had written something that was relevant to our unit. For example, we had written terms, written work, important people, new ideas, and places on our game board. Students were divided into two teams. Each team would send 2 students up at a time to try to claim a space. This is how it happened: Teacher read a question aloud for both teams to hear. Students had to stay behind the line until the question was completed. After teacher finished reading, the student pair would have to run to the spot on the bingo board that matched with the teacher's question. Once arriving, the team would have to answer a follow up question. If they answered it correctly, those two students would stand in that spot. If they answered the follow up question incorrectly, then the other team's pair would have a chance to steal the spot. If both teams answered the follow up question incorrectly, first team to arrive gets the spot, and the teacher knows this is an area to review and reteach. Same process continues until one team has 5 of the spots in a row.

This is easily adaptable to vocabulary instruction. Writing vocabulary words in the bingo spots and reading definitions as the questions could be one possibility. Or a teacher could read a sentence with a (blank) in it and students would have to fill the blank with the appropriate word. Easy peasy.

With all of the different learning styles teachers need to be aware of and attend to, this activity helps a lot with kinesthetic learners. Also, it is just a fun game! Other aspects can be added, such as prizes or bonus squares, and I am sure there are a lot of other ways to make this activity even better.