Learning through Games: Bingo with a twist!

It was a moral science class with a twist. It was a good habits Bingo game!

On this International Volunteer Day we wanted to do something different with the children of Friend Society’s (FS) youth club. I asked my friend at iVolunteer and she told me they are planning a game of civic housie. I didn’t get into the details but civic housie reminded me of a nursery rhyme bingo that my niece’s kindergarten teacher had once organised for the children. When I floated the idea of a game of good habits bingo/ housie to other volunteers, everyone was game for it.

The idea was to have bingo/ housie tickets which, instead of numbers, will have good habit sentences in each box. Since the children were between 5 years to 15 years of age, we had to keep the sentences simple such as “I will study daily”; “I will share my things”; “I will cut my nails”; “I will bathe daily” etc. It seems easy but when we started thinking, it was difficult to go beyond some 15 sentences but we needed a lot more!

There was some brainstorming over emails, but the real progress happened when, the night before, we all sat down together in the volunteer room at FS. Within half hour we had over 30 sentences and then Viral translated them all in Hindi :).

We then used some permutation/ combination to create 20 unique 3X3 matrix Bingo tickets. Here’s a snapshot of one:

On the day, the kids somehow knew there is something new planned for the day. One could clearly see how they didn’t want to study and straight away wanted to get into the play hour :). For the 30 sentences used in the 20 Bingo tickets we made chits, folded and put them in a bowl. We then explained the game and bingo! it started 🙂

Bingo with a twist!

• There are 9 boxes, each with a sentence.
• There are some chits in the bowl and didi/ bhaiya will pick up one of these chits and shout out loud the sentence written on the chit.
• You have to check if the sentence is in your ticket. If yes, cross it.
• There are prizes for 3 rows and 3 full houses. Once you have a complete row crossed out, you raise your hand and come forward.
• You have to speak about the sentence at which your row was complete and then enjoy your prize!
• The game continues till 3 tickets are completely crossed out (3 full houses).

Simple? Well during the game, of course, there was a lot of chaos! How would it be fun otherwise? And afterwards we had a cracker party and lots of one-minute energiser games with the children. All in all we did manage high decibel levels and lots of entropy :).

What are the different games that you use to make learning fun? If you need the Bingo tickets we used feel free to contact us and we will be happy to email the file to you :).