Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

For students struggling to learn the alphabet. It is an Alphabet Arc with further practice pages that have an increasing number of blanks to fill in. It is designed to be given out as one page at a time, to help in memorising it. I encourage my students to write out the alphabet on their exam paper, to avoid them making avoidable errors in the alphabetical order questions. 

Editor's note

A Beginners / Entry 1 level set of activities to introduce and practise using adjectives within the theme of travel.

Practise vocabulary, antonyms, spelling, sentence structure and handwriting.

Editor's note

Although written for ESOL most parts of this resource are also very suitable for E1-2 Functional English. In addition to the many tasks it also provides a short overview of adjectives  and basic sentence structure . Great for the build up to summer holidays - or indeed any time of year!

Cut and order word sort based on transport, money and grammar terms.  Tasks and extension tasks on the same sheet. Scissors needed for separating the cards. Works best with students working in pairs.

Editor's notes

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best! With useful extension ideas. Laminate for repeated use. Also handy for Functional English alphabetical order work.

Word sort activity based on collective nouns/collocations for different types of foods. Suitable for E1/E2. Can be done in pairs as a reading and S+L activity, or individually. 

Editor's notes

With extension idea. Cards could be laminated for repeated use. Other vocabulary sorts are available from the same contributor.

Basic vocabulary word sorts, the first being based on fruit, vegetables and drinks, and the second on places (e.g. town, city), food and animals. Tasks and extension tasks on the same sheet. Scissors needed for separating the cards. Works best with students working in pairs.

Editor's notes

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best! With useful extension ideas. Laminate for repeated use. Also handy for Functional English alphabetical order work

This is a fun activity which encourages learners to use IT vocabulary to identify common devices, emojis and icons. It includes a link to an on-screen Wordwall activity where they can test what they already know about devices and common computing icons. 

Editor's note

I put this together when I found so many of my learners trying to hone their employability skills did not know what a lot of the words on job descriptions meant. 

Resource 1 (Definition matching cards: job skills and attributes): I laminated these and cut them up and they worked in pairs or threes to match them up.

There are two other linked resources, as below, to help students with getting to grips with the keywords used in Job Descriptions and Person Specifications. 

Get your learners thinking outside the box with this unusual warm up quiz that works well at all levels

Also provides discussion prompts and makes a great introduction to spelling compound words.

These three simple resources are aimed for teaching the layout features and conventions of informal and formal letter writing.  There are three templates: 

A hangman style game created in Google Jamboard (a free animated whiteboard app). Based on a game I used to play on a traditional whiteboard with a cut-out crocodile and person (held in place with blu-tac!) and river created with a blue whiteboard marker. When Covid-19 and remote teaching came along, I needed something else.

You can access the jamboard here.