There was a farmer had a dog....

and bingo was his name-o!

In my Integrated Algebra 1 class we've been doing basic operations with numbers...  adding, subtracting, and multiplying. Seriously.  But the kids really need the review, especially when we throw in those pesky negatives!

So today, to have a little bit of fun with multiplying, I made some Bingo cards.  Have you seen the site print-bingo.com?  Fun.  You type in a list of things that you want in the blocks, and the site creates 10 different bingo cards.  If you have a class of more than 10 kids, you're guaranteed some repeats, but since I have exactly 10 kids it was perfect.  I saved the cards (2 per page) as a pdf, then printed them on cardstock and laminated them.  I was going to make a powerpoint to give the clues (kids find the product) but I couldn't figure out how to get the slides in a random order (so if we played more than once we would get a different result).  I know I've done it before but this new version of Powerpoint confused me.  Oh well.  I ended up just writing all of the possible answers on slips of paper and made up problems as I went.  That actually worked out well; I kept a list of the problems we'd done so the kids could see.  I have one student who works verrrry slooooowly, so he was able to keep up that way, too.

The one thing that I hadn't figured out was what to use to cover up the squares.  But the ladies I eat lunch with (after seeing my laminated cards) suggested I just give dry-erase markers.  I'd never realized that they would erase off of lamination!  It was great!  The kids loved using the markers and they were all engaged in the game.  I'm definitely keeping this set of cards for next year!

The best thing was that (after doing all of the problems... and each game took about 15 different clues) one of the kids said that he was really getting better at doing these problems.  Yay. :)