Telling the Time Bingo

This may sound a little surprising, but, telling the time is one thing that many adults seem to take for granted. By this, it means that most of the time when we glance at the time, like the time on your computer desktop or your cellphone, it really doesn't involve so much effort in telling what time of the day it is because it's already digitally there. Nonetheless, we are really not born to have the ability in time telling, and we must admit that we first learn how to tell the time in school.

Learning how to tell the time requires a good teaching along with constant practice. Because of this, teacher are always hunting for better methods that they can use as a classroom activity to encourage students to stimulate their mind in time telling. One educational activity that has totally boomed in popularity as a means of teaching is bingo. In this case, it's time telling bingo.

To play time telling bingo, the students are given a bingo card that they will use in the game. Instead of containing numbers as that of the traditional bingo, in here the card contains times of the day. This will be the basis of how the game is going to work. The teacher here is the bingo caller; she will read out different times. The students will then mark the time being called out to the corresponding squares on their cards. Say for instance, the teacher would call out "quarter to three", the students will look for the square containing "2:45". Telling the time bingo has two variations. The teacher can choose between 12 hours clocks and 24 hour clocks. For younger students, it is recommended to use the 12 hour clocks since it is a common everyday use. In some cases, teachers can hold a clock in front of the students and set the hands of the clock to a particular time. The students will read what the clock says and look for the time on their bingo cards. Whatever variant you choose to play, the same objective applies like that in the traditional bingo game. The students must be able to mark off all the squares corresponding to a certain pattern, usually line patterns.

Educational bingo can be played in different variants. The good things about this is that, not only that the students have fun playing bingo, they can also learn things that would help them develop their ability to tell the time in such case.