Music-themed bingo

Image above: A large red bingo card with numbers on it, and multicolored bingo chips

1. Who - This activity is for older adults living in a residential facility, particularly those experiencing isolation.
   
   

2. How - Below is a step-by-step task analysis of key steps that my target population could follow to carry out this activity. I designed this task analysis knowing that staff from the community partner facility are currently offering bingo games from the hallway while residents play from their rooms. The facility also owns iPads, which staff could use to play recordings for music-themed bingo. (A more challenging version of this activity could be to create bingo cards with musical artists on them, rather than songs.)
   
   

   1. Introduce the activity: a music-themed game of bingo where we match the songs that play to song titles on the bingo card. 

   2. Distribute bingo cards and supplies to residents who wish to play in their rooms, greeting each resident. In order to follow the facility’s disease control safety precautions, print one-time-use cards or put cards in a plastic sheet protector that can be wiped down/sanitized and reused.

   3. Announce that the first song is about to play, and prompt players to mark the song if it is on their bingo card. 

   4. Play the first song from the playlist. If using Spotify Free, have the mute button ready, as ads may play periodically.

   5. Wait about 30 seconds, then ask, “Who knows what song that was?”

   6. Repeat steps 3 through 5 for the other songs on the playlist until someone gets “bingo.”

   7. Continue to play as others get “bingo” through the entire playlist.
      
      

3. Materials: 

   1. Themed bingo cards

      • I found a website, myfreebingocards.com, where I could create a set of 30 bingo cards for free and save them as a PDF. This enabled me to send the PDF to the facility for them to keep and print multiple times as needed.

   2. Playlist of songs for bingo

   3. Device to access playlist

   4. Writing utensils or manipulatives to track songs on bingo card

   5. Additional speakers, depending on the distance from the iPad/other sound source
      
      

4. Supporting multimedia:
   
   PDF of bingo cards

Spotify Playlist

An electronic version of the music-themed bingo game is available here.