Educational bingo is increasingly popular as a classroom activity as more and more teachers are realizing that the game can easily be adapted to a variety of different lesson plans. Apart from the simple fact that students of all ages can enjoy the game, there are many other reasons by bingo is growing in popularity, not least the fact that it's very inexpensive to play (important given the constraints that today's teachers work under), but also the facts that game play mechanics can be modified to teaching pretty much any subject to any age range of students.

Bingo can play a role in teaching many different subjects, including math (the squares on bingo cards can be printed with math problems for which students must write in the answers rather than simply marking off squares), telling the time, geography, history, science, foreign languages, and yes, reading. In fact, bingo particularly excels in reading classes, and it is here that the game is most commonly encountered in schools.

In reading bingo, the game is played using the same basic game play mechanics as traditional bingo - the player's (student's) objective is to find a line of five matching items vertically, horizontally or diagonally as the items are announced by the bingo caller (teacher), however the bingo cards are printed with words instead of the usual numbers. These words can be sight words (words that students must learn to immediately recognize in order to achieve reading fluency), words that students are in the process of practicing this week, or they can be chosen specially in order to practice a variety of phonics games. Some examples of phonics games, include the teacher asking students to find rhymes, find a longer word that contains a shorter word or sound, find a word that the teacher reads out slowly (e.g. "fff-lll-aaa-p") so that students must practice "blending" letters, and so on.