Get to Know You Activities - Create Bingo Cards For Get to Know You Bingo

I recently wrote an article discussing the importance of teachers using get to know you activities to reduce classroom management problems and improve academic achievement.  In that article I shared one of my favorite get to know you activities that I call the "Interview and Introduction".  In this activity students answer a series of questions about themselves on an index card, the teacher then redistributes those cards and then has the students walk around the room "interviewing" each other until they find the person whose card they have.  Students then "introduce" each other. 

One of the great things about this activity is that the teacher gets to collect the cards and use the information on those cards for follow-up get to know you activities.

In this article I'd like to share with you one of those follow-up get to know you activities.  I call it...Get To Know You Bingo.

It's simple and fun...

First, I take the index cards I collected from the "Interview and Introduction" activity and use the information on them to create bingo cards. I simply go through each index card a place one thing about each student in each bingo square. Each student then gets their own bingo sheet and walks around the room trying to find which of their classmates matches up with which bingo square.  When students find a match they get their classmate to sign that particular box. Five signatures in a row wins Bingo!

Of course, it is much easier to create bingo cards if you have some type of bingo card creator software.  However, even if you do not own any software to create bingo cards, the time it takes is well worth it!  Students are up and moving about the classroom and having lots of fun, but more importantly, students form and build upon their relationships with one another and this will have a huge impact on both classroom management and academic achievement throughout the school year.