Bingo nights are a sure-fire programming hit! Highly adaptable to themes, literacy tie-ins, and intergenerational fun, these nights are popular and potent for supporting larger library outcomes.
Types of Bingo
If you want to keep it to the basics, you can play with a standard board with numbers. Add some fun by changing the winning outcome. You can play until players get a bingo, a blackout, borders, and more.
If you have the time to dip your toes into theming and literacy connections, you can adapt the board yourself or buy premade sets.
If you’re buying sets, Kaplan has a small but mighty collection of picture-based boards with animal, alphabet, and more themes. These sets are great for building vocabulary as you play. It is fun to call out animals sound or act out their movements before calling their names to first to give players a chance to guess what is next.
These events are friendly to the incorporation of similar games from other cultures, like Lotería.
Build Your Own
If you want to be more intentional about incorporating literacy or other outcome supporting content, you can use bingo board generator sites. Build boards around rhyming clues, words with graphemes, and more. And just like that, your bingo night is also doing some literacy heavy lifting!
A favorite literacy-bingo of mine is nook bingo. Choose a book and use words that appear in it to generate boards. When it is time to play, I will read aloud and have players mark words as they hear them. This is a great one to do all together with a shared board to help everyone learn the basic rules. You’ll never have an audience hang on your every word quite like this!
What You’ll Need
Securing a large room with covered tables is ideal. If you’re using picture-based boards, it is nice to be able to show the cards you’ve called via a document camera feed. If you aren’t set up for this, enunciate cards clearly and introduce rules to protect you from kids repeatedly asking what has already been called.
Next, decide how you want players to mark their boards. If reusing materials, investing in a set of bingo chips and magnets will keep boards clean. If you’re okay to get a little messy, bingo paint daubers are the most fun way for kids to mark their boards, and they can paint the table too! Markers and themed stamps are great too.
Making sure you have enough boards for everyone is vital! When using sets, I’ll run them through our copier to create multiples. This will mean multiple groups getting bingos at the same time, but this adds to the fun. Small prizes that are on theme or interesting to your target age range will keep the competition alive while ensuring you have enough to hand out all night.
If you really want to go wild with it, try adding themes or even springing for a glow in the dark event (they make neon paint daubers!).
Structuring Your Event
I’m a big fan of bingo nights, as they are friendly to families with working caregivers. Bingo is also great for classroom outreach, especially when using the literacy ideas above.
Running this event solo is possible, but having a designated bingo caller and a designated prize distributer helps the event flow smoothly. You can instruct winners to raise their hands, and the prize distributer can make their way around the room while you continue the game or vamp for time. At the beginning of each round, set expectations by announcing how players will win, and how many winners you’ll have that round. If you’re playing for the first 5 bingos, you can then announce that you’ll continue with the same boards until the first 2 people get blackouts.
Many folks are happy to roll right into the next game, but I like to break up the evening with mini-games. This gives kids a chance to move between rounds, while building in time to hand out new boards. Musical chairs, balloon pops, or guided stretching are easy, low-cost ways to break up the evening.
Bingo in Action
The not-so-secret power of these events is how seamlessly they invite intergenerational learning and teamwork. Arranging your tables in long rows with chairs on both sides will encourage families to sit together and talk during the event. Families are on the hunt for opportunities to share together that are fun and educational. Bingo can be that perfect blend to get people excited about learning through play.
Eleanor Howell-Shryock (she/they) is the Head Children’s Librarian, managing family and outreach services at Burlington Public Library in Burlington, Washington. They are the Chair Emeritus of the Washington Library Association’s Children and Young Adult Services Section. They are excited to highlight some of the unique challenges and opportunities of working in small and rural libraries for the ALSC blog.