Spanish vocabulary bingo: Spanish on the cards, English from the caller

How to run it with a beginner class

The page opens with Animales on 4x4 cards without a free space, 30 cards and 4 per page: a class set on 8 sheets of Letter or A4. Use Start from above the box to load Colores y números, La comida or En la clase instead, set the card count to the number of students, and delete the lines you have not taught yet. Each 4x4 card holds 16 of the list's 34 to 36 words, so a little under half of the calls land on any one card. For a first lesson or children of 6 or 7, choose 3x3 (9 words a card); 5x5 with the free space uses 24 of the words, which is closer to a whole-list check than a game.

What to call. The cards show the Spanish; the caller sheet lists the English in a shuffled order, and the Spanish it belongs to is printed small and grey at the end of each line. Read “the apple”, give the class a few seconds, tick it, and students cover la manzana. Hearing the meaning and finding the Spanish is the direction of a vocabulary quiz, so it is real recall, not matching. For a listening round, read the small Spanish word instead, twice, and students find what they heard: it is good practice for the sounds English speakers stumble on, such as the silent h in huevo and helado, the j in jirafa and the ll in pollito and silla. Print calling cards gives one small card per English clue, 12 to a page, to cut out and draw from a bowl.

How to win. Agree before the first call: a full row, column or diagonal for the first round, the whole card for the second. The winner reads their covered squares aloud in Spanish, article included, and you check each one against the small print on your sheet. If a square was covered for the wrong English word, the game carries on, and the whole class has just heard the right pair. Asking for the article in the read-back is the cheap way to make gender stick.

Why every noun has el or la

A Spanish noun is learned with its gender, and the article is the gender: el libro, la mesa. Plurals keep theirs too: las uvas (grapes) and las tijeras (scissors) are plural in Spanish as in English. Two entries are worth pointing out: el agua is a feminine noun that takes el because it starts with a stressed a (it is still el agua fría and las aguas), and el mapa is masculine although it ends in -a. Colours and numbers are printed without an article because that is how beginners meet them, next to a noun: un gato negro, tres perros.

Spain or Latin America

Where the everyday word differs, the lists use the form most common in Latin America, which is what most classes in the US learn: la papa (Spain: la patata), el jugo (Spain: el zumo) and la computadora (Spain: el ordenador). Mexico often says café for brown where the list has marrón, and la pluma for a pen; Argentina says la banana for el plátano. If your course uses the other word, change that line in the box (la patata = potato) before you press Generate. The box is saved in this browser, so the changed list is still there next lesson.

Accents, and what prints

The PDF uses the built-in Helvetica font, which has á é í ó ú ü ñ, the capitals and the opening ¿ and ¡, so every word in these lists prints exactly as written, including el pingüino and dieciséis. Type the accents in your own pairs too: on a phone keyboard, hold a vowel or the n down to get the accented letter. If you paste a character the PDF font cannot show, the page names the word before you print and Print cards in the browser shows it correctly. An accent you leave out is not an error to the generator: raton and ratón are simply different squares, so check your spelling.

Pictures for children who cannot read yet

Choose Pictures for pre-readers at the top of the form. The box fills with 36 drawings named in Spanish (18 animals, 10 foods and 8 classroom things, all also in the word lists), the cards switch to 3x3, and each square shows a black line drawing with its Spanish word underneath. Picture mode has no English clue: the caller sheet shows each drawing with its Spanish name, so you can say el gato and let the children find the cat, or hold up a calling card and have the class name it in Spanish before anyone covers it. Untick Show the word under each picture for a pure listening game, where the only Spanish is what the children hear. The drawings are the same ones the other picture pages use, drawn for this site or taken from Tabler Icons (MIT licence), listed in CREDITS.md.

What it does not cover

The lists are nouns, colours and numbers for a first term: no verbs, no phrases and no grammar beyond the article. Bingo trains recognising a word and its meaning quickly; it does not make anyone say a sentence, so pair it with speaking work. The English clues are short glosses, not definitions, and a few have a second meaning a student may raise (orange is both naranja the colour and la naranja the fruit, which is why those two clues say which). For definitions in English, or a list in another language, the vocabulary bingo page takes any word = clue pairs, and English learners have their own ESL bingo page.

For late October there is Day of the Dead bingo: a 57-word Spanish list of the ofrenda, its food and the family (la vela, el cempasúchil, la abuela), with each noun's article, to call in English.