Printable winter bingo cards

Winter bingo for a class or a cold day in

The page opens with the classroom list loaded, 25 cards (one class) and 4x4 cards with no free space. Use Start from above the word box to switch to the cosy at-home list. Edit before you print: if your school never sees snow, take out the snow plow and the snow fort and add what your winter does bring, such as frost on the field or rain boots by the door. Your edited list stays in this browser for next time.

Why a winter list with no holidays in it

A winter class often includes children who celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah in December, Lunar New Year in January or February, or nothing at all, and some schools ask teachers to keep seasonal activities free of religious content. Winter itself belongs to everyone in the room. Neither list contains a holiday, a gift, a decoration or a religious word; the page's own test fails if one is added. That also means the cards still make sense in the third week of January, when the holiday sets are out of date and the snow usually arrives.

Which list, which size

The classroom list has 56 squares across five topics: weather (sleet, blizzard, wind chill, freezing fog), science (frost, icicle, ice crystal, "water freezes at 0°C"), animals in winter (snowshoe hare, a bear asleep in its den, geese flying south), clothing (earmuffs, snow pants, bobble hat) and snow activities (snow fort, sledding hill, catching a snowflake on your tongue). Several squares are a lesson in a word: hibernate, migrate and animal tracks each lead straight into a five-minute talk about how animals get through the cold.

The cosy at-home list has 56 squares for a snow day, a weekend or a family games evening: a blanket fort, a hot water bottle, soup for lunch, a jigsaw puzzle, wet gloves drying on the heater, dark by 5 pm. None of them is a brand. Mark them as they happen over a day or a whole week, rather than calling them out in one sitting.

For Pre-K and kindergarten, choose 3x3: nine squares is about as many as a four-year-old can scan, and short squares like frost, mittens and penguin fit in big print. Swap any word your class cannot read for one they can, or draw a small picture beside it. Use 4x4 for ages six to eight and 5x5 with the free space for older children and adults.

The 5x5 blackout

On a 5x5 card with the free space, a blackout means all 24 word squares must be called. With 56 words on the caller sheet, the first blackout comes late: in 2,000 simulated games with 25 players, the first card filled after a median of 50 calls (between 48 and 52 in four games out of five), so plan on reading almost the whole list; that is why it suits the last lesson before a break, an indoor recess when it is too icy to go outside, or a long snowy afternoon at home. For a shorter game, play first line, then four corners, then blackout on the same cards.

The caller sheet doubles as a word wall

Press Caller sheet to print every word on the list in shuffled order with a tick box. In a classroom, print a second copy, cut it into strips and pin it up as a winter word wall before you play: children who have seen "icicle" and "thermometer" on the wall for a few days recognise them faster when they are called. Tick words off the sheet as you call them, and check a winning card against the ticks.

Printing 2 or 4 per page

Choose 2 per page for 5x5 cards so longer squares such as "Shortest day of the year" stay readable, and 4 per page for 3x3 or 4x4 cards. A class of 25 on 4 per page is 7 sheets of paper; on 2 per page it is 13. Press Print cards with margins set to Default and scale at 100%, or choose Download PDF to send the file to a school copier. Slide cards into clear plastic sleeves with a dry-wipe pen if you want to reuse them every winter.

What it cannot do

The classroom list is written for places with a cold, snowy winter. In a mild climate many squares (snowdrift, frozen pond, avalanche) will never be seen, so treat them as vocabulary to call rather than things to spot, or replace them. The page does not ship pictures; for non-readers, draw them or use 3x3 cards with the simplest words.