This fascinating article from the BBC news site (May 07, 2008) makes a great starting point for discussion about large numbers with  Level 1/2 students.

Here's a sample:

"It is estimated you can get 50,000 pennies into a cubic foot - a trillion pennies would fill two St Paul's Cathedrals."

Alternatively you may want to compare a million to a trillion by placing a credit card next to Ben Nevis.

Then again you can illustrate the scale of this number by comparing the fact that a million seconds equals 11.5 days, a billion seconds is 32 years and a trillion is 32,000 years."

Gaby Adnitt

Milton Keynes Adult Education

Here are some quick maths ideas and links for Halloween

How about some calculations based on trick or treating?
E.g. A group of 6 friends visit 9 houses. Each time they open the door they get 7 sweets. How many each at the end of the evening? What will they do with the left over sweets?

Tesco have loads of Halloween items in the online shop. Some money work – estimating and calculating?

Some ratio and proportion work with Halloween recipes?

I found a couple of Halloween questions here: http://www.transum.org/software/SW/Starter_of_the_day/starter_October31.asp

Judith White. Somerset Skills & Learning. October 2007

Hi Maggie,

Here’s a quick teaching idea for a starter activity. After the “final” Olympic budget for 2012 was announced last week, I asked my learners if they could write out £9.3 billion in full. I suggested they used headings, as follows:

Then I told them that the figure wasn’t £9.3 billion, but £9.35 billion, and asked them if the extra digit was worth very much. I got them to subtract one figure from the other – they were shocked to discover that the 5 represented an extra £50,000,000.

Hiya Maggie

Just had to tell you about a session I led today in Literacy. I had in my mind writing ransom notes as another type of text etc. We worked as a group (only 6 of us) and had to decide what we were going to 'kidnap' in order to write a ransom note.

To cut a long story short we decided to 'dognap' one of the Queen's corgis and hold him ('Willow') up to ransom. This involved a little research on the internet too. Surprisingly, by the end of the session we had produced a plan of action for the kidnap (by swapping dogs in Hyde Park, ) the Ransom Note, a newspaper report on the incident, a poster police statements a poem based on the incident which turned out to be a rap.

All this in temps of 85+. We came together at the end to write a final report on the incident which itself turned out to be highly amusing.

Best Wishes

Nice selection here
http://homepages.tesco.net/~derek.berger/holidays/halloween.html

Many of these make good Entry Level reading practice.

Hi Maggie,

In my class tonight I challenged everyone to estimate the time difference between the UK and Ghana.

Of course, this was a trick question as Ghana is in the same time zone as us

(Time zones can be checked at http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/  )

The estimates varied between 2 hours and 12. This led to a discussion of the meaning of the word 'difference': how a time difference of +2 hrs and a difference of -2 hrs are both, nevertheless, a difference of 2.

It also led to discussion of distance and expectations; people expected a time difference because there was a great distance involved. They were able to discuss from the perspective of their own knowledge of specific places and specific time differences.

It was a very interesting exercise for everyone and involved all members of a very disparate group, including English, Maths and ESOL learners.

yours,

Lydia Spurrier-Dawes LSpurrier-Dawes@Cardiff.gov.uk

Cardiff Basic Skills Service and Cardiff Youth Service March 20 2007

Maggie

I was in touch with you ages ago when I was working with a group who were very keen on putting their work up on a display board and we organised a theme for the whole year – 1900-1950 which involved a lot of research and writing up by the students – it was hard work for everyone but we enjoyed it. 

This year the group opted to choose a short book for us all to read and our library kindly ordered enough copies for everyone.  Each week we read a chapter out loud – everyone takes a turn and from this I can then plan some activities and pick up numerous themes in spelling, punctuation, comprehension etc.

It seems to be working well and we are nearly half way through the book and planning the next one!

Many thanks

D. Griffiths

Hi Maggie

Don't know if this is of use to you, but something I tried the other day with my class which seemed to work well was an exercise in word families and root words. 

I bought some small plant pots and seed labels, and wrote out some root words and suffixes on the labels.  I then "planted" these in the pots (filled them with cotton wool!) and asked the students to grow new words from the root word - each pot had a root word plus several suffixes, some of which could be used with the root word, and others that couldn't. 

They worked in pairs, wrote their words on the board, then I gave them a few prefixes and they moved on to create more words. The exercise seemed to go down well and they grasped the concept very quickly!

Regards

Hi Maggie.

I came across a '12 days of Christmas' resource on the TES site where the idea is to work out the number of presents on each day, and also the cumulative number of presents over the 12 days (just by adding).

To differentiate for my Level 2 students I changed it and just looked at the presents on each day. I then introduced the formula below to work out the number of presents on any given day. It went well!

n (n+1)

_____

    2

We followed this up by looking at a useful Christmas formula i.e. cooking times for a turkey. Have a great Christmas!