The Old Stand-by: Bingo

Some things never change and one of those things is that kids still like to play bingo every now and then in math class.
Last summer I picked up the reproducible book Math-O published by Mark Twain Media/Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company. It says it is for grades 5-8+. I paid $9.00 for it and I have gotten a lot of use out of it. It has generic bingo cards in the back that can be easily copied and laminated and it also has templates for making your own games. The first forty or so pages are how to use the generic games for different skills like order of operations, fractions, exponents, percents, and basic operations to name some. I have made my own games to include the skills of positive and negative integers, big numbers, and more fractions.

Today the eighth grade group did a lot of positive and negative integer problems and didn't do a single worksheet. We saved paper, strengthened listening skills and had a good time practicing adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative numbers. After one boy won both games in a row, I had him trade places with me to read the problems while I sat with the other kids and played. This gave me a chance to see how the other students were doing and give some instructive prompting, which helped review the rules for computation with integers. And the boy who took my place really enjoyed doing it!

At my last school we had a number of bingo games for the middle school grades that were purchased through the NASCO Company. Everything from pre-algebra bingo to mental math bingo. The students would always hope for and sometimes request a bingo day if we went for a long time without one. What a way to practice and learn!