# substitution bingo

26 Jan 2014

This short post is the first of 2014; having moved house and changed school this is the first opportunity I have had to write this up.

### basic game

The lesson simply starts as a game of bingo - played on a 3 by 3 grid with students picking their nine numbers from 1 to 30. This slide can be used as a template and displays the four letters that will be used for substitution. Here is a set of numbers to call out at random, with students first aiming for a line (any row, column or diagonal) and then a full house.

### the rest of the lesson

At this point I tell the students that I created the numbers in September 2009 (the truth) and that I am bored of calling out the same numbers every time I do this lesson (not quite so true, I’m just happy that I’ve already done the work). I challenge students to create a new set of numbers and tell them that we will play a game at the end of the lesson with someone’s numbers. As a class we choose four new letters with values between 2 and 9. They then write out numbers 1 to 30 in three columns of ten and we find a few examples to start them off. I find that telling them we will use their numbers at the end of the lesson gives them ownership of the task and hence the motivation to be thorough and accurate.

### differentiation

I’ve done this lesson many times with a large range of abilities. It can be differentiated by

• only allowing letters in calculations (harder) or allowing letters and numbers
• making the substitutions more difficult, e.g, $x = 7.2$, $y = 5$
• restricting the number of operations or types of operation
• selecting the fourth number based on the choice for the first three numbers (e.g if the students choose 7,8,9 then selecting a 2 may be more useful to them that selecting 7).