Printable fall bingo cards

Fall bingo from September to November

The page opens with the outdoors list loaded, 25 cards and 4x4 cards with no free space. Use Start from above the word box to switch to the classroom list. Set the card count to your class size or the number of people on the walk, and edit the words before you print: a city school with no orchard nearby can swap "Ladder in an orchard" and "Hay ride" for things in its own playground. Your edited list stays in this browser for next time.

Neither list mentions Halloween or Thanksgiving, so the cards work for the whole season, in schools that avoid holiday themes, and in places where autumn runs from March to May. Pumpkins appear only as a patch you visit and a plant's life cycle. If you want the holidays, there are separate Halloween and Thanksgiving pages.

Outdoors: a spotting game, no caller

For an orchard visit, a park walk or a farm day, give each person a card, a pencil and something to lean on, and let them mark squares when they actually see, hear or do the thing. Nobody calls the words. A 4x4 card from 56 words will never all come true in one trip; a typical two-hour outing at a pick-your-own farm covers perhaps 20 of the 56, so most players get a line and almost nobody gets a full card. For children under six, use 3x3 cards and read the squares aloud before you set off. Some squares depend on where you live: woolly bear caterpillars and chipmunks are North American, horse chestnuts and starling flocks are easier to find in Britain and Europe, so take out what your area does not have.

Classroom: a called game that teaches the words

Indoors, press Caller sheet and read the words in its shuffled order. To make it more than marking, give a clue instead of the word: say "the green pigment that leaves stop making in autumn" and let the class find Chlorophyll. With 25 players on 4x4 cards and all 57 classroom words, our simulation of 4,000 games found the first line after a median of 15 calls (between 10 and 19 in eight games out of ten); on 3x3 cards it fell to 10. That leaves time for a short explanation of each word. The vocabulary suits roughly ages 7 to 11; for younger classes, delete the science terms such as Anthocyanin and Decomposer and keep the colour and month words.

An honest limit: the classroom list mixes single words with short activities such as "Leaf rubbing" and "Count the apple seeds". Those squares are best called after the class has done the activity that week, otherwise they are just words on a card.

Printing

Choose 4 per page for 3x3 and 4x4 cards and 2 per page for 5x5, so a square like "Wind blows leaves sideways" stays readable. Twenty-five cards on 4 per page is 7 sheets of paper. Press Print cards with margins at Default and scale at 100%, or Download PDF to print at school. Outdoors, card stock or a clipboard survives wind and damp grass better than plain paper.