Christmas Music Bingo

Submitted by Susan Young, Texas

Idea posted March 17, 2003

Here is something I do each year, and so far my students have really liked it. It would also help them not get bored with singing Christmas songs.

Have students fill in a blank Bingo card (I made mine in Excel) with names of nine of their favorite Christmas carols. They may pick from a list of Christmas carols you put on the board.

The teacher has a deck of index cards with one Christmas carol listed on each. (I play the carols on the piano, so I have the page number of the song with the title. If you use a CD or CDs, then you could list the slot of your CD player and the track for easy reference. If you sing all the time, this would be just for reference to make sure you don't double a song.) The teacher then plays the song that is listed on the card she draws. Once a student knows (or thinks s/he knows) the name of the song, s/he stands up. When called upon, s/he names the song. Once a correct title is given, all students with that song on their cards may put a bingo chip on that square. The winner will get three in a row (just like Bingo).

You can play this over and over again as time allows. My students like to trade cards and play this the last two weeks before Christmas break. One year they even asked for it in the middle of March! (Had me a little worried. Ha Ha!)

I use the index cards to check to see if a student has really won or not. You could write down the songs as they are played, but I found that the game went quicker when I used index cards. Sometimes I did little prizes, and sometimes I just played the game for the fun of it. (More often than not I do the latter.)