Here’s a fun fall activity. Take the kids on a walk in the park or your neighborhood and bring a bingo game! The theme features things you might find in your neighborhood such as a stop sign, bicycle, squirrel and a two door car.
Simply print out the cards and cut them out. Paste them to cardboard as a backing to make them sturdier for your walk. Bring pencils to mark the squares.
A victory for sight-impaired bingo players and others with disabilities:
“The cards have an audio chip to read card numbers, allowing those with sight problems to hear the card numbers rather than see the numbers. The cards make it much easier for blind or visually-impaired people to play bingo, however when fellow players complained about Joanna’s cards, she was told by her bingo club that she had to mute the sounds, or she was not permitted to play.
After filing a complaint with the Racing and Wagering Board, Joanna was eventually granted to right to use her audible bingo cards, and as a result of this landmark ruling, bingo halls are now required by law to allow audible cards to be used by all players, including visually-impaired players.”
With so many theme bingo card options around, we sometimes forget that folks might just want to make plain old bingo cards sometimes. Here’s a simple, printable bingo grid with all of the squares blank except for a free space in the middle. If you’re not playing with a very large group, you can probably download what you need on cardstock and make them one at a time. You may also want to enlist others’ help in populating the squares with numbers.
Bingo is about as athletic as we get, but we really enjoyed this story about how bingo card games were introduced at Chicago Cubs games. Winners of the sports bingo game won autographed memorabilia and other neat prizes and the fans absolutely loved it!
This from Matthew Wszolek, Director of sales and promotions, Chicago Cubs:
“Giveaways for us have always been a very important piece of what we do, not necessarily to drive ticket sales but more or less to enhance the Wrigley Field experience. … There’s other ways to skin the promotional cat when it comes to expenses and economic conditions in that you can do something like we did in September of this year where we had Bingo Night. Out of all the years I’ve done stuff here, this is my ninth year, it was the most incredibly well-received promotion we ever did. People received bingo cards when they came in to the game that had one of 51 different elements on it that could happen in a baseball game, not just Cubs-specific. If they covered the card, they won a bingo, which was autographed memorabilia or the chance to throw out a first pitch next year. Fans were interactively playing along the entire game. Instead of just giving them an item that they kept, they got to play along for three hours. People were ridiculously out of their minds, and I got 250 letters from season-ticket holders saying that was the most fun they’ve had at a ball game, especially given the fact that we weren’t playing very well at the time. It made the Wrigley Field experience better.”
Bingo is a great way to engage both kids and adults about books and reading. Check out this neat bingo card idea created by the Salem-South Lyon District Library. Cards are distributed at the beginning of a “game,” which may last for a summer, or for several months. Each player attempts to read a book and complete the necessary tasks in order to create bingo. For example, to win bingo with this card, you’d have to do the following things:
Everyone who participates receives a free book.
