How a teacher’s bingo game helps children read
Published: August 28, 2005
WHAT started as an inspiration during teaching practice four years ago is now the main driver behind the success of her reading classes at St Aloysius Prep School in Kingston.
And just last year Coreen Dennis took her dream a step further, investing close to $100,000 to produce and market two newly developed Bingo Word games under the titles ‘My Family’ and ‘My Body’.
“Not only is it a learning tool but it’s a game in itself,” Dennis told Career&Education. She has been using the game at St Aloysius for the last four years, since completing her diploma at St Joseph’s Teachers College.
The game is similar to a regular bingo game, only its target is children ages five and up, and it introduces words and concepts used in the grades one and two primary school curriculum.
The aim, according to the game’s instructions is: “To increase children’s word vocabulary, knowledge of word family, ability to spell and confidence to use these words.”
Each game is equipped with 50 cards, which is the maximum number of children that can play at one time, and a bag of word tiles. At the start of the game a leader or ‘caller’ is selected.
He or she picks a tile and calls the word. The players then check to see if the word is on their card. When a player has covered all the words on his card then he is declared winner.Parents say the game’s competitive pull and its resemblance to the adult bingo are showing good results in their children.
“It teaches them to spell, identify words and helps them to read faster,” says Rosemarie Foster whose daughter is a student in Dennis’ class.
“It helps a whole lot,” said Denecia McFarlane, another parent speaking of her six-year-old daughter.
“She wants to go to school every morning early, because she says, ‘Miss is going to play bingo’.
So every morning I have to hurry up.”
Motivation aside, Dennis points out that many parents believe that their child, coming out of kindergarten, have some ability to read, but often it’s a misconception.
“When the children come to you at grade one, they (parents) say, ‘Miss they can read. They read all the books in infant school.’ But when you take the same words and put them on the board, the children look at them as if they are German.
They don’t know the words, because they swatted the book. They associate what is being read with the pictures on the page,” said the teacher.
“When they interact with the game on a daily basis they learn the words, they are able to use the words in a sentence and to comprehend their meaning. When they take the words individually as a unit and then put them together to make a sentence, then it has more meaning to them.”
In response to requests from her teaching colleagues and others, Dennis is now developing two more titles: ‘My School’ and ‘Who Am I’.
The first two games are available in Kingston at Woolworth in the Mall Plaza, Kingston Bookshop on King Street, Lees Pharmacy, Boulevard Super Centre; and in St Ann at Johnny’s Pharmacy in Salem.
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