B. I. N. G. O. – Laura Ingalls Edition.
It’s been a while really.
But when Papaw and Grandma made their pilgrimage from the great north to the even greater south, they brought along a little game with them.
It was a fishing version of bingo.
The kids got kind of obsessed.
Otto is a huge fan of all things fishing. (“Hissing” he still pronounces it.)
And all the kids love to play games.
They played this bingo game about eight times every afternoon. And then again after dinner for another half dozen rounds. Insatiable. Their appetite for bingo was insatiable.
Of course I needed to tap into that insatiability.
And so.
We created our own Laura Ingalls bingo game.
The bingo concept is so incredibly easy to copy and to turn into a fun way to reinforce anything you’re learning about.
First we cut some card stock into squares to serve as game boards.
Next we added an equal amount of sharpie-drawn squares to each game board.
We brainstormed items from the Little House on the Prairie books – dug out, wagon, Laura, Mary, Pa, Jack, Plum Creek, Nellie, Ma, Mr. Edwards, school house, the cabin, a panther, a gun, Silver Lake, a bear, the china shepherdess.
We filled our squares with drawings – one item per square. I made sure the kids wrote down what they drew in the square too – just in case some of the art was, uh, less than understandable. (I like that none of the game boards match at all. This one below is before we added the words.)
We then took small cards – I happened to have a stack of blank business-sized cards from a former math curriculum – but you could cut cards to any size or use index cards (I like to use what we have on hand) and on those cards we wrote down and drew a picture to match whatever we had written on our larger square game boards.
The kids gathered some marble-ish type do-dads. See how exact I am? The kind of thing used in flower arrangements and crafts. You could use pennies or cut out squares of paper.
And then, as easy as that, we played Little House on the Prairie Bingo.
