Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

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.

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.

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 resource for mixed ability groups. It can act as an ice breaker and will help students ot think about word choice and context. It is useful in writing sessions.

This can be played by 4 or more players. If you have more than 8, you may want to print out the “things” cards twice.

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.

This is a combination of speaking & listening, note taking & writing, that I have used successfully as an ice breaker with new groups. It involves learners talking to several people and finding out about their food likes & dislikes (plus allergies, religious considerations etc) before planning a menu for a dinner party. The menu must be acceptable to all the guests! Finally each learner produces their menu presented in a conventional style.

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.

A mingling exercise to get students talking to one another. Great as an induction activity for new classes or for ESOL learners to practise speaking and listening.

An engaging and interesting lesson plan and note taking worksheet for a session using short film trailers to develop email writing skills.

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.