Making printable animal cards and bingo boards from a random list

One draw, one sheet of paper, and a set of cards that does not repeat itself across thirty students.

A printed set of animal cards is the cheapest teaching material there is, and the reason most teachers do not make one is the setup cost: choosing twenty animals that are different enough, then checking that no two boards match. A random draw removes the first problem, and a simple rule removes the second.

Start with the right number of animals

Two numbers matter, and they are not the same number.

The first is how many animals go on one board or card set. For bingo, a 3×3 grid is nine animals; a 4×4 grid is sixteen. For a matching game, twelve pairs is a good size for a table of four students — fewer and the game ends before they settle, more and the table runs out of space.

The second is how many distinct animals you draw in total. For a class of thirty with nine animals per board, you want a pool of at least twenty-five to thirty animals, because boards built from a pool of nine would all be identical.

Open the generator, keep unique results on, and draw the total you need in one round — thirty animals for a class of thirty. Then allocate nine per board yourself, or shuffle them in a spreadsheet.

Keeping boards different

If every board has nine animals drawn from a pool of thirty, the boards will differ, but two students can still end up with the same set in a different order. Whether that matters depends on the game:

The cheapest way to guarantee uniqueness is to number the boards and write the animal list for each board on the back before you cut anything. Thirty boards, thirty lists, five minutes with a pencil.

What to put on a card

Four options, in order of how much preparation they need:

  1. Name only. Fastest. Works for reading practice and for games where the point is the word.
  2. Name and scientific name. One extra line per card, and it turns the set into a taxonomy exercise as well. The scientific name guide covers the conventions if students will read them aloud.
  3. Name and a blank box. Students draw the animal themselves before the game starts. This doubles the value of the material and costs nothing but time.
  4. Name and a photo. The most work, and the one to be careful with: photos of animals need to be licensed for reuse, and a mixed set of images from search results will not be. The generator links each species to its iNaturalist page, where the licence for each photo is stated.

Printing

Plain paper works for a single lesson; card stock survives a term. Two practical notes:

If you are printing thirty boards, a monochrome laser printer will do it in a couple of minutes; an inkjet will do it in twenty and may jam. This is the one piece of equipment where the cheap option is genuinely the right one for a classroom.

A five-minute version

If you have five minutes rather than an evening: draw nine animals, write them on the board, and have each student copy them into a 3×3 grid in their own order. That is a bingo board. The random draw did the part that takes thought; the students did the part that takes time.

The same trick works for a matching game at a single table: draw six animals twice, write them on twelve slips, and hand them out.

Keeping the sets

Write the pool and the date on the back of the set — reptiles, 2026-10-18 — and keep sets in envelopes rather than elastic bands, which crease the cards. A set that is labelled gets reused; an unlabelled set gets thrown away in June because nobody remembers what it was for.

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