History Bingo Cards for Teaching

In the past, learning history in school tended to be very much about learning numerous facts, figures, and details of historical events. What was the date that the Magna Carta was signed? What years did that King Henry VI reign? What were the names of Christopher Columbus' ships? In the 60s, 70s and 80s, however there was a tendency to put less emphasis on facts, and instead concentrate on teaching students about the forces and movements behind particular historical events: the rise of capitalism, the birth of the working classes, or the driving forces behind colonialism.

Both approaches to teaching history can have disadvantages. Too much emphasis on facts can leave students with a lack of understanding of the broader historical context behind those facts. Conversely, it's hard to understand much about historical forces and movements unless you know the key facts. For this reason, the best history teachers today combine the best of both worlds - teaching both facts and events, and the reasons behind them.

The best history teachers are always alert to the possibility of new classroom activities which can engage students - when it's fun, it can be amazing just how quickly students can learn. Educational games are therefore a popular classroom activity, but what games to play? One possibility is bingo.

You're probably familiar with the standard game - the caller selects and calls out numbers at random, players tick those numbers of their cards, and the first player to get a line of numbers is the winner. Educational variants of bingo are basically the same, with the teacher acting as caller, the students as players, but with one important difference: instead of numbers, the cards contain the facts, names, places or figures to be learned. Inventive teachers can also modify the game play somewhat to emphasize the educational aspects of the game - for example, using each item as it is called out as the starting point for class discussion, or calling out "clues" instead of the actual items on the cards.

Teachers reading this article are probably overflowing with ideas for how they could use bingo as a teaching tool - but the ideas of course will come to nothing unless they have access to the materials to play the game. In the past, the usual way to get printed materials for educational bingo was to send off for them - such supplies were often hard to find, expensive, and would not necessarily contain the exact items that a teacher wanted for their particular lesson plan. Today however, teachers can print their own bingo cards from their computer - and this becomes a snap thanks to the availability of free ready-to-use history bingo printables on the Internet, and affordable software for making your own custom bingo cards.