Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

Use alone or as a consolidation resource for learners after attempting  E2 Homophone Cloze Exercises’ and/or  E3 Homophone Cloze Exercises – Set 1’ . Covers 7 sets of homophones from the E2 and E3 spelling lists. There are also some follow-up exercises.

Short sets of words for alphabetic sorting.   These can be used with literacy or ESOL learners.  I found they worked well at the beginning of each session while learners were still arriving into the class.  They work well as individual or pairs exercises.

The first set works best when each list is cut up and laminated as individual words in each group, so learners can sort them kinaesthetically.  

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.

This resource helps learners hear rhymes and recognise corresponding letters/digraphs, rimes and onsets etc. Take simple limericks and poems and get your learners to put them together.

I created my own limericks to match work we had been doing on long vowel sounds (it is not that difficult to do once you get started). Well-known poems and nursery rhymes also proved particularly popular as many knew them already by heart from childhood and some were doing them now with their children.

Root word family cards are two sets of flash cards that can be used to visualise the concept of root words to entry level and L1 students.

The entry level cards contain a number of root words and their word families, with a picture representation of each word. The level one sheet contains a higher level of vocabulary and the pictures have been removed.

Lesson Ideas

Visual colour-coded resource, explaining the main plural spelling rules. Created for E2/E3 learners, but could also be useful for all visual learners working between E2-L2.

Includes: colour-coded fact sheet, blank table, worksheet and flash cards to cut out and laminate. Could be used for a number of different activities.

Set of integrated form filling resources used in an E1-2 ESOL class but also suitable for E3 Literacy and E2 Functional English. Includes key words and pictures, synonyms matching activity and two short reading / form filling tasks.

Another super 18 page student workbook originally written for Milestone 8, E1-2 ESOL students to use at the beginning of the academic year. Complete with student and tutor record pages, evaluation, and answer sheets. Includes spelling, reading, cloze exercises and comprehension, form-filling, sentences, word searches and a crossword.

Coronation Street resources – 8 super pages of Entry 2 resources based on this popular soap. Cloze exercise, matching game, alphabetical order, form filling, punctuation and more.
Adapted from Sally Shipton’s Emmerdale resource (see below).

Aa cut and stick or matching activity first used with New Deal students (laminate for re-use). Makes a good start up activity or prompt for discussion and form filling practice.