General Resources

A quick but very useful match-up activity that makes a good starter activity for financial literacy or employment skills courses - and it's bound to prompt discussion.

Editor's note

Written for an Australian audience but I have added a UK version on page 2.  Learners can draw lines to match the items or, for a reusable resource, the page could be laminated and/or cut into 12 cards. 

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. 

A set of Entry 1 and Entry 2 English tasks that focus on two short texts about the alphabetical list of winter storm names released by the Met Office. The first Functional English resource I have written based on the revised Functional Skills English content (2018) which will be used by awarding organisations from September 2019 [1]. 

A quick paper based quiz on the EU adapted from the on-screen version on the uk.gov site at: www.eureferendum.gov.uk
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It isn’t directly about the referendum but might be useful to spark debates. Multiple choice, questions such as ‘how many countries are in the EU’ etc…..

This is a game to form new words using syllables.All these words have three parts to them and multiple words can be made using different parts in different order

I have used this with L1 and L2 learners and they love it. I let them work in groups – no more than 5 otherwise it gets a bit too busy and confusing.

You may need to have pre-taught some common prefixes and suffixes and rules; how prefixes never change the spelling of the root word they join, etc..

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.

Students design a board game to demonstrate their learning. This can incorporate IT skills (Word template provided below) or can be done with paper, card and pens.

I originally did this with an E2E group and it proved popular. It’s an alternative to the “design a poster” task to review learning. The instructions are set out as a board game. it can be used for literacy, numeracy, ICT or ESOL.

An outstanding set of resources. Developed to prompt discussion on knife crime with parents and children in a family learning setting, they are equally suitable in an FE setting – prompting discussion between students and tutors. The materials can be used to focus on knife crime but are also useful as part of wider discussion about criminal behaviour.

The resources include

A really unusual, fun and effective way to reinforce and revise mean, mode, median and range. With extensive teacher notes and differentiation ideas.

Fun, multi-purpose speaking / reading / listening / writing / maths warm-up activity that can be used at any level and for any subject – particularly effective at Entry Level. Learners shake two dice to locate a word on a number matrix (good for maths:co-ordinates too!).
Five sample grids are provided – covering descriptions, homophones (2 grids), spellings and clothes – plus a blank grid so you can make your own. Includes full instructions and can also be used for numeracy.