Warm-up

Cards which can be used as a plenary or warm up to match definitions and features to types of text.
Editor’s note
With Functional English mapping

This is a great session starter. Students will work on their sentence construction and vocabulary with a card game that allows them to experiment with word order and effective word choice. Students have to put the words into a sensible order, even if the subject of their film is far from sensible.

In this game, students compete to make the scariest film title, or to sabotage other people’s film titles. It is a light hearted and fun game. The film titles created can also become writing prompts.

A straightforward addition and subtraction worksheet which can be used a starter or a worksheet for adult learners. Also useful for teenagers doing budgeting, independent living, etc.

This is great as a warm-up activity or a bit of end-of-term fun. It is suitable for a mixed ability group of numeracy learners, or indeed literacy or ESOL learners. This quiz tests learners’ knowledge of how old someone has to be in order to do certain things legally, e.g. be a blood donor. It can be used in small group or pair work (which worked well for me) as well as individually.

Place value game involving dice and calculators. Helps build confidence with place value.
Can be used with all ability levels and easy to adapt.
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The classic example of a tally is keeping track of how many cars of each colour go past in the street, but that is rather awkward to do in practice.

Use this presentation to save having to leave the comfort of the classroom! It is a PowerPoint slideshow of cars of various colours, to be projected onto the board. Tell learners to keep a tally of how many cars of each colour appear. Where a car has more than one colour, they should put it under the predominant colour.

E1 learners could focus on simply counting (for instance) all the red cars.

A classic anonymous poem that has the correct spelling but the wrong words.

Read the poem aloud to your students before they have sight of it. Then give them page 1 of the work sheet.

Worksheets and tasks around the theme of emergencies. Written for ESOL but also suitable for adult literacy and Functionakl English.

Place value starter based on an Open University course activity.

Useful as a carousel activity at the start of a lesson. Could be adapted for E2 by using 2 boxes rather than three. You may want to laminate the second page.

I have found that many numeracy students get scared when you mention terms like percentages or fractions. I therefore developed this introductory activity for my new level 1 numeracy students. They are mostly young parents who were disengaged at school and have no mathematics qualifications.

They are usually nervous when they attend the first session so I try to boost their confidence and reassure them that the course will not be like school.