I'm always on the lookout for more ways to drill and practise vocabulary and structures. During the summer holiday I had the idea of using sentence builders to play bingo with.
One unit of learning that I have used it with is Pets, in particular saying that you have more than one pet. I used the bottom half of this sentence builder:
and drew up the above grid as my checklist so that I knew which sentences I had said.
Altogether with this sentence builder it's possible to make 36 sentences. I asked Year 4 to choose 5 sentences and write them in their books. Then I read out the sentences one by one in a random order. I repeated each one twice, just in case, and then went straight on to the next one. The children needed to listen carefully and constantly check their sentences, ticking off any sentences they had that I said. When they had ticked off all 5 of their sentences they had to call out "Bingo" and then to check I asked them to read their sentences back to me. I used my grid to check they were right.
We then continued until most children had heard their sentences. Some children were frustrated at the end because they had missed one of their sentences and so didn't get bingo. I did point out, though, that they had heard and identified 4 out of their 5 sentences, so not to get hung up on just one.
The classes that I tried this with said that they enjoyed it. I liked it because they got to hear over 60 sentences all in one go.
You may well have been playing this game for ages! I don't remember having heard it from anyone else.
