Bingo game is a fun activity that can be used to practise language bits ranging from beginners to advanced for all playful ages. It is also useful for large classes because it makes students focus and activate their auditory and visual senses, thus enhancing learning.

However, one  problem that usually arises is having to photocopy different Bingo Sheets for large classes. It is such waste of paper and time to produce a nice let’s say animal vocabulary template and use it just once, since the students are going to mark their answers or draw on their cards.

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One easy way to avoid this is to insert the Bingo Sheets into transparent sheet protectors. Then ask your students to draw, write or mark on the protectors using whiteboard markers or soft crayons (they have to be the really soft ones) and clean them up with a  piece of plain paper tissue at the end. Apart from the printing paper, all the other materials can be provided by your students, if they don’t already exist at school. One tip here: it worths printing your Bingo templates on paper thicker than regular paper to delay wrinkling by repeated use. 

That way there are so many good results: you save paper and time, your students can reuse the Bingo sheets as many times as you think it is necessary, you can use them with different classes or next year, and above all your students get to practise writing too if you decide to provide them with blank Bingo cards. The latter is what I have been using with C class to practise the alphabet: First I let my students write their random letters, then we start the game and whenever someone shouts “Bingo!”, they have to report their Bingo letters to the class, thus practising all four skills. The same can be done with words or phrases of course!

Making a Bingo sheet is really easy, since there are several different websites with their own printable versions of bingo cards, but you can also make your own on a word processor, as I did mine.

I have designed two different blank Bingo Sheets: one 3×3 grid and one 4×4 grid, and printed one on each side so we can vary our games. I have made them black and white, since there are no colour photocopiers at school, but this didn’t really matter, because the pupils absolutely like customizing them with their markers. You can see the result above. Here is a free printable PDF for you, if you like it. It could make a nice warm-up activity for the first 2014 class! What do you think?