Bingo is a classic preschool kids party game that you and your computer can customize to virtually any party theme you can think of. No major computer skills required and it won’t take you forever to do.
For purposes of illustration, let’s assume you’re having an animal themed birthday party. Preschool aged kids love anything about animals, so it’s a good theme. The trick is always to tie your games to the theme, and with Bingo, it’s easy.
Fire up your favorite graphics program that provides you with clip art you can use royalty free for non-commercial purposes. I ALWAYS start with Microsoft’s Word’s on-line clip art collection. (in my Word 2003 version, it’s the head-shot icon in the drawing toolbar.) Find and download about 30 clips related to your theme – in this case 30 animals.
In Word, insert a 5×6 table into a blank page, expand the boxes to be of equal size and then paste a copy of each downloaded picture in each box. Format each picture layout to ‘in front of text’ so you can size it to fit in each square of your table grid. These are your bingo tiles. Print them out on card stock (so they have a little weight to them to be manipulated without falling apart) so the ‘caller’ can randomly select them for the game.
On the next page of this document, create a 4×4 table, size the cells to be equal in size and randomly copy pictures to place into this second table until it’s full. Print on card stock, delete the pictures and repeat until you have a bingo card for all your guests.
To use for Animal Bingo or to physically see how this all works, you can download animal bingo from my website. You can also see all our ideas for kids party games on the site.
