Picture/Screenshot BINGO

Once again, I need to share an absolutely great idea which I learned from Annabelle Williamson (LaMaestraLoca) herself at IFLT this past summer. It is a simple twist on vocabulary BINGO, but gosh what a twist! I will never look at vocabulary BINGO the same. The premise is still the same as BINGO but instead of individual vocabulary words in the grid, there are pictures or screenshots from a known story. So, instead of reading out individual vocabulary words, you are calling out full sentences from that story in the target language. This is such a GREAT post-reading, listening comprehension activity.

The downside of this activity is that it requires LOTS of time/effort on your part prior to the activity, as you will be pre-making the BINGO grids for students and making different BINGO grids. You will need to know which sentences are possible for each column so that you can put those pictures in those particular columns. Yes, there will be multiple copies of the same BINGO boards among the students, which means multiple winners at the same time. I played this like normal vocabulary BINGO and pulled cards which had the Latin sentences on them out of a bag so that the game was still random. I still called out the letter so that students knew in which column to look, along with the sentence. Example: "N - pisces non erant in reti." 

Below are some examples of some BINGO boards which I made for the prologue of Andrew Olympi's Perseus et Rex Malus - I created a 4x4 grid for this, since 5x5 was too small for the pictures. I made 11 different BINGO grids.

Observations

1. I loved that I was able to get in LOTS of repetitions of the sentences as I read them at least 3-4 times for each picture. Even if a student did not have that picture which I called, that student still heard understandable messages.
2. I thought that students would find this difficult, but it was not at all for them. Yes, it required that students listen to the Latin, but because we had gone over the story so many times in different ways, they knew the sentences well.
3. The pictures need to be completely obvious of what the sentence is portraying, or else the message is not comprehensible for students.
4. If using screen shots as pictures, make sure that they transfer well to your BINGO grid. Many times, screenshots do not turn out well if you are printing in black/white.
5. I suppose you could have students create their own BINGO sheet by drawing in the pictures themselves but to me, that would take a lot of time. Perhaps if you wanted to make it a 2-day activity of drawing the pictures one day and then playing the next.