| Many of us, perhaps most of adults, have played | | | | games based around the particular holiday in |
| bingo at one point or another in their lives. Maybe | | | | question. In this case, the bingo cards are in fact |
| only once or twice, but nevertheless we know | | | | printed with words or phrases relating to the |
| the rules - get a bingo card, check off items from | | | | particular holiday. Similarly, more and more |
| your card as they are called out, and try to be | | | | teachers are now using bingo as a classroom |
| the first person to shout out "Bingo!" if you | | | | activity in a diverse range of subjects including |
| achieve the winning pattern (a line of five items in | | | | K-12 Reading lessons, ESL (English as a Second |
| any direction in most variants of the game, but | | | | Language), math, science, foreign languages and |
| sometimes other shapes or patterns may be | | | | more - and in this case, bingo cards containing |
| used). | | | | items appropriate for the particular lesson are |
| One thing that you may not have thought about, | | | | used. |
| is how bingo cards are created. This is because, | | | | So how are these custom bingo cards prepared? |
| for most us, when we played the game, we | | | | One possibility is of course to do so manually - a |
| were simply given a bingo card that was already | | | | person could prepare bingo cards using pen and |
| printed with numbers, and creating a unique bingo | | | | paper, or even a word processor, but it would be |
| card for each player was simply somebody else's | | | | a very time consuming process. The main |
| problem. | | | | alternative is to instead using special bingo card |
| Today, you will find however that themed | | | | maker software - you enter a list of possible |
| versions of bingo are growing in popularity. At | | | | items, specify how many cards you want, click a |
| Christmas, on July 4th, Halloween, Easter and | | | | button and you're done. |
| other holidays, many people like to organize | | | | |