Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

An introduction lesson for ESOL/Pre Entry to help build learner confidence and introduce them to college rules/expectations.

Editor's note

Two complete and very welcoming lessons. Also covers asking and responding to questions about personal information, recognising letters of the alphabet, and classroom equipment.  Lovely :)

Three sets of dominoes to use in warm-up and for letter and word recognition activities. The first set, for pre-Entry ESOL and Literacy learners with very low levels of letter and word recognition, matches lower case to capital letter versions, the second set is a set of “doubles”, which can be used alongside the first. The third set, for pre-Entry / Entry 1 ESOL learners, matches a category to an example. Each set has 17 dominoes, so 4 each for a group of 4 learners, plus one to start.

Write or match the correct word under each picture.
Milk, bread, oil, tea, eggs, potatoes, bananas, and biscuits.

20 literacy and numeracy questions to warm up the new term! All based on the words HAPPY NEW YEAR (can easily be adapted for other festivals such a Diwali, New Year’s Eve or Ramadan). Covers vowels, consonants, number, ratios, simple substitution, range, mode and more!
Ideal for mixed ability groups (E1-L2). Also provides very good practice in reading instructions carefully.
For higher level groups it could be completed in teams as a speed test.

A fun starter or plenary activity for the Christmas season to revise spelling of cardinal numbers. The worksheet contains a version of the traditional Christmas lyrics with all the cardinal numbers replaced by gaps for students to complete, thus gaining practice in spelling the numbers 1 to 12, as required by Cambridge Progression Entry Level 1 Sentence Unit. Students are then prompted to write the remaining numbers up to 20, as required by Cambridge Progression Entry Level 2 Sentence Unit.

Mingle activity to use straight after the Christmas holidays to review past simple.
Learners ask each other questions to try to find one name of another learner to fill in each square. First to finish shouts “bingo!”
Review as a group and check questions using past simple.
Give a prize to the winner.

The Core Curriculum and Functions Skills Progression Overview side-by-side.
Editor’s note
The print quality of this resource may be low as it is a cut, pasted and scanned (very useful) document. It is not available, even to contributors, as a Word document.
Richard has also posted a link to an interactive version of this document.

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.

This carousel of Jubilee tasks was hurriedly put together for a group of 10 E1-E3 Functional Maths and English 16-19 year old learners who had just (very successfully!) finished all their Edexcel Functional Skills assessments.

After a year of hard work from my students, the emphasis was on celebration and fun. However, learning objectives included: measuring, counting, writing an email, spelling, 2D shapes, estimating, rounding and working with money. Rough lesson outline also included.

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