Picture bingo with a winter set of twenty eight drawings: an igloo, a snow shovel, earmuffs, a thermometer, a woolly jumper, a log fire, a snowdrop, a snow hare and the rest. Six cards on a 4 by 4 grid plus a caller sheet, which is seven pages as the page opens.
A winter set, not the Christmas one relabelled
Twenty of the twenty eight were drawn for this set: the igloo, the snow shovel, the thermometer, the snow cloud, the woolly hat, the woolly jumper, the earmuffs, the ice skate, the sled, the footprints, the snowy hills, the bare tree, the snowy fir, the log fire, the snow globe, the snowdrop, the penguin, the polar bear, the snow hare and the snowy owl.
Eight come from the Christmas picture set, because they already draw winter things and a second snowman would be a difference for the sake of it: the snowman, the snowflake, the icicles, the mitten, the scarf, the hot cocoa, the pine cone and the robin.
A vacuum flask was drawn for the set and then taken out again. It read as a flask on its own, but the hot cocoa mug sits two squares away on the same card, and at that size a child calling the flask a travel mug is not wrong. A bingo set has to be unambiguous against itself before it is complete.
Why the page opens on 4 by 4
Sixteen squares drawn from a pool of twenty eight means two cards can genuinely differ, and no two share more than a third of their positions. A line comes in reasonable time and the game ends while a room of children is still interested in it.
Five by five has a free centre and twenty four squares, so four of the twenty eight are left off every card. That matters more than it sounds: at a pool of exactly twenty four every card would hold every picture, the caller would reach the end of the list and the whole room would call house on the same breath. Three by three is the one for the youngest, where a line can land in six calls.
The caller sheet
The last page lists all twenty eight pictures with their names and a tick box each. Call one at a time and cross it off, or cut the squares out and draw them from a bowl if you would rather the order was not yours to choose.
Print it on card if you are cutting the squares up. Keep it either way: with six cards in play, a picture called twice is the thing that starts the argument.
Questions
- How many pictures are in the winter bingo set?
- Twenty eight, four more than the twenty four squares of a 5 by 5 card, so some are left off every card. They include an igloo, a snow shovel, earmuffs, a log fire, a snowdrop and a snow hare.
- Are these the same pictures as the Christmas bingo?
- Mostly not. Twenty were drawn for the winter set. Eight are shared with the Christmas one, because a snowman, a snowflake, icicles, a mitten, a scarf, hot cocoa, a pine cone and a robin are winter subjects already.
- Will two children end up with the same card?
- No. Each card is built separately from a shuffled pool, and no two share more than a third of their positions, so a room of thirty gets thirty different cards.
- How many cards can I print?
- One, two, four, six, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-four or thirty. Each card is its own page, so the six this page opens on plus the caller sheet comes out as a seven page PDF.
- Which grid suits young children?
- Three by three. Nine squares means a line can come in six calls, the game finishes before attention does, and several rounds fit into the time one larger game takes.