YOUR MINUTES || BINGO ANTICIPATION GUIDE
Welcome to another Your Minutes post that features YOU! Here you will see educators sharing how they spend their minutes doing what they do best.
I had the pleasure this year of getting to know the talented educator Jacklin McKee. She introduced me to the concept of gamification in the classroom, and I was fascinated. Today she is sharing her own spin on it with the Bingo Anticipation Guide. I think you will love it!
Anticipation guides are a great way to activate prior knowledge and build curiosity. But a lot of anticipation guides are boring and some students, and even teachers, see them as a waste of time. So why not make a game of it? By making an anticipation guide BINGO game board, students enthusiastically make predictions and strategize about the upcoming activity. You can use them with slideshows, articles, and more! I like to use them when we’re watching history documentaries. Filling out the BINGO board builds anticipation even more because students are incentivized to win the game.
All you have to do is come up with five categories, which serve in the role of the letters B-I-N-G-O. So now in your Civil War unit, for example, you have columns like Causes, Generals, Battles, Homefront, and Reconstruction. Students brainstorm five keys words to write in each column. They should strategize the placement of their words. An obvious word like “Gettysburg” should be placed in the middle, since it’s very likely Gettysburg will come up and that middle square is such an important space on the board. Some students ask if they can use their book to find good key words. To which I say "yes" and think to myself: Did a student really just energetically volunteer to do more work by reading and analyzing their text?
Once students have filled all 25 boxes with keywords, you can begin the activity. When my class is about to watch a documentary, as soon as I press play students are sitting on the edge of their seat listening intently. If they hear one of their keywords they highlight it, no matter which column it is in. Decide beforehand if you want students to shout “BINGO!” mid-activity.
It is up to teacher discretion whether or not to accept synonyms and alternative words with similar meanings-- for example if a student wrote ‘slavery,’ but the movie says ‘free labor.’ This just turned into a vocabulary lesson and an interesting discussion! It’s fun when students raise their hand to ask if a word counts. It means they’re thinking about the content and connecting ideas. I often put students in groups to deliberate whether or not a certain keyword should be counted. Another way to extend the activity is to ask students to write a sentence or paragraph using at least five keywords from different columns.
In my gamified classroom*, students earn experience points (XP) which do not relate to grades. On the BINGO board, students earn one XP for every word they highlight. If the word is part of a five-in-a-row, it is worth two points. Some words may be part of multiple bingos, so those words are worth even more! If your classroom isn’t gamified, you should at least acknowledge the student/s who earned the most points. Have fun with this engaging activity!
*For more information about gamified classrooms, check out mrmatera.com, follow @mrmatera and #xplap, and read Explore Like a Pirate.
MEET JACKLIN
Jacklin McKee is a seventh and eighth-grade social studies teacher at the Basilica School of Saint Mary in Alexandria, Virginia. She hopes to inspire creativity and enthusiasm for learning in all of her students.