If you have been following my blog for some time, then you know that each year, we build a collection of junk which we refer to as our math tokens. Â Today we put our math tokens to good work by making a DIY junk bingo game…
To make our game, I selected a jar of tokens from our collection of junk and sorted them out on our copy machine. I copied the tokens on a cardstock that was already printed with a blank bingo template.
My bingo cards turned out a little dark because I couldn’t close the copier all the way with the junk on the glass but my students didn’t give it any thought. We set out the DIY junk bingo cards with a basket of lids and our jar of junk…
Our prekindergarten class played junk bingo as a whole group. The children used lids we have also collected this year as their bingo card covers…
To play the game, I pulled out an object from our jar of math tokens (the same tokens used to make the cards) and then held it up for the children to see it. I would say something like, “Who has a red button on their card?” and the children would look to see if their card had a red button. If there was a red button on their card, the children covered that square of the bingo board with a lid…
There was a great deal of visual discrimination required to play the game. In our version of junk bingo, the goal was to cover all the squares on their bingo board and then call out “Bingo!” This was the children’s first experience with the game of bingo so we kept it as simple as possible and focused more on the process of listening and looking to see what object was picked out next from our jar then looking to see if the object was on their bingo board…
Of course, even though we didn’t focus on “winning the game” the children were eager to shout out “BINGO” when they completed covering their board…
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