You can customize simple content games for the
classroom to help students review and reinforce knowledge. It just takes a
little creativity. Follow the steps to create your own content bingo.
Establish
a list of terms (people, places, things) students need to know.
For this effort, my list
includes: Samuel
Gompers, Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, NAACP, Jacob Riis, Upton
Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller.
Establish a list of descriptors for
your terms. You should include at least two descriptors for each term. The descriptors
can apply to more than one term.
Example- “Muckraker” describes Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis,
and Ida Tarbell.
The descriptor for my set are below.
American Federation of Labor, Ghost
Dance , The Jungle, Conservation, Reservations, US Steel, Hull House, Wounded
Knee, Captain of Industry, National Parks, How the Other Half Lives, Vertical
Integration, Progressive, Civil Rights, Standard Oil, Meat Packing, Homestead
Strike, Horizontal Integration, Robber Baron, Meat Inspection Act, The
History of Standard Oil
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Ensure that students have organized
what they have learned about the terms. Students could use a simple chart to
organize what they have studied.
People
and Groups of the Gilded Age
|
|
Samuel
Gompers
|
|
Jane
Addams
|
|
Theodore
Roosevelt
|
|
Sitting
Bull
|
|
NAACP
|
|
Jacob
Riis
|
|
Upton
Sinclair
|
|
Ida
Tarbell
|
|
Andrew
Carnegie
|
|
John
D. Rockefeller
|
|
Students
will use the list of terms to customize their bingo boards. I used the simple board below. Students
started by writing a name of a person or group from the set above.
Once students have customized their boards.
You only have to explain the rules and begin game play.
We played using the rules below in
class.
·
The goal of the game was to get three
correctly complete three boxes in a row.
·
You can make a horizontal, vertical,
or diagonal row.
·
A square is complete when the term
is matched with two correct descriptors.
·
The term and descriptors must match
in both historical accuracy and historical interpretation.
·
Once a row is completed the player
yells “bingo.”
·
The squares must be verified before
a winner can be declared.
To select descriptors during game play, I used
the spinner from classtools.net that can be customized with a simple typed
list. The spinner was projected on the board and the chosen word simply popped
up.
This was a simple way to add a game
to my class. It got students talking about the topic and provided a form of
review they were attentive to as they played to win.
How do you add games to your class?
