SPELLING
Spelling Bingo

Submitted by: Claudia Franke
From: Parana, Brazil
Date Submitted: April 19, 2005

I´m an EFL teacher at Everest International School for 4th and 5th graders. We have Spellings every Friday, so in order to motivate my students to study the words and learn their meanings, I really like to play this simple game. It goes like this:

First I give out Bingo Cards (I usually have plenty of copies in my class). These cards should have 4 squares going across and 5 squares going down. Then I slowly call out all 20 words (students write them randomly in the 20 squares). Ask them not to look at their friend´s cards.

When we are all finished with the words, I start giving them clues about the words, so they can match to the spelling words (example: "apple" is the spelling word, so then I say: "I´m thinking of a word that means a fruit, a red, sweet, juicy fruit"...and so on). When they find the spelling word, they should use a coloring pencil to fill in the squares......**important---make sure you keep track of the words you are calling out.

The first student(s) to fill in the 4 squares across, or 5 squares down should call out "BINGO". Sometimes we can have up to 3 winners. To be a Bingo Winner the student must have all the words that the meanings were called out spelled correctly (that´s the part I like, because they study to do well). As a prize they can get pencils, candy, stickers and they get to have their names put up on our Bulletin Board as Bingo Winners of the Week!