Picture bingo cards

Playing picture bingo with children who cannot read yet

The page opens with the Animals list on 3x3 cards, 20 cards and 4 per page, so a group of 20 needs five sheets of paper. A 3x3 card has nine big squares, which is about right for three- and four-year-olds: they can scan it without getting lost, and a line takes only three matching calls. Choose 4x4 once children manage a 3x3 card easily. Use Start from above the box to switch to Around the house and food, and delete any line in the box to take that picture out of the game; every card is still different.

How to call it

Say the word and show the picture on the caller sheet at the same time. The sheet lists every picture in a shuffled order with a small drawing beside each word and a box to tick, so an older brother or sister who is still learning to read can be the caller too. For animals, make the noise first and let the children guess (a moo, a quack, a buzz), then show the picture. Children cover the square with a counter, a button or a piece of cereal, or colour it in. A first line is the usual win; with little ones, carry on until everyone has a line, so nobody leaves without a turn at shouting "bingo".

With a laptop on a projector or a TV, Call this game on screen (under the print buttons, once the cards are made) opens the on-screen caller with this list and set number already in it. Each press of Next shows the drawing about a third of the screen tall on a laptop and half the width of a phone, with the word under it unless you switch that off, so children who cannot read the word can still find the square. The calls come out in exactly the order of the printed caller sheet for the same set, and if you deleted pictures from the list the caller takes your edited list instead, as long as you open it in the same browser.

Words under the pictures, or not

Show the word under each picture is on when the page opens. Leave it on for children who are starting to read: the word sits next to a drawing they already know, which is how a lot of early reading practice works. Untick it and the cards redraw with the same pictures in the same places, only bigger and without words, which suits children who are not reading at all, or a group learning a second language where you want them to say the word themselves. Changing it does not shuffle the cards, so you can print one set both ways.

The pictures, and their limits

The pictures are simple black line drawings, not photographs, so some need a word from you the first time: beetle is a round bug, chilli is a curved pepper and sweet is a wrapped sweet. The words are British English. If your children say ladybug, trash can, candy or stroller, change ladybird, bin, sweet or pram in the box: a word that is not in the two lists still prints, but as a word with no picture, and the count above the box tells you how many squares that applies to.

The 72 house and food pictures and 10 of the animals (cat, dog, fish, horse, pig, butterfly, beetle, spider, bat and deer) come from Tabler Icons, version 3.49.0, which is published under the MIT licence. The other 24 animals were drawn for this page in the same line style. Everything is part of this site, so the cards work offline once the page has loaded, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

Printing

Press Print cards, set margins to Default and scale to 100%. Download PDF gives one file with every card, the drawings in the squares, and the caller sheet at the end; your browser turns each drawing into a 256-pixel picture first, so the file is a few hundred kilobytes rather than a few, and the drawings stay sharp at card size but go soft if you blow one card up to a poster. The PDF caller sheet lists the words without the small pictures; for the picture caller sheet use Caller sheet and print it. The drawings print in black on white, so they come out clearly on a black-and-white printer and children can colour them in afterwards. Four per page gives quarter-sheet cards; two per page is easier for small hands.