Adult Numeracy, Functional Maths, and GCSE Resources

A challenging project where students must research, plan and cost a luxury garden. Includes scale diagrams, money, and shape and space problems (paving slabs). Extension options cover percentages and averages. Great for horticulture students or anyone with an interest in gardening.
Also ideal for L1-2 Functional Maths.
The project also involves web investigation (costs of garden materials) and writing a covering letter (selling the finished garden design) and therefore also covers Functional ICT and Functional English.

M&Ms Investigation is an adaptation of the 2007 L1-2 Smarties resource from Judith White – it is particularly useful now as it seems that sadly the Smarties factory now uses an accurate counter and all tubes contain the same number of sweets! Covers bar charts, pictograms, tallies. Also discusses averages and analyses collective data.

Smarties graphs and pie charts is yet another adaptation of our ever-popular resource. This version is aimed at L1-2 and covers pie charts, bar charts, averages and tallies.

Car park survey pictogram creator is a clever Excel sheet for recording the different numbers of coloured cars in a car park.
Two versions are available – v1 has 1 picture representing 1 car, version 2 has one picture representing 5 cars.

Skittles pictogram creator is a very clever Excel sheet to accompany our ever popular Smarties data handling resource and it a great way of combining numeracy and IT skills(many tutors are now using Skittles as an alternative to Smarties because there is more variation in the numbers/colours of sweets per packet).

Buying herbs at the garden centre is based on packets of seeds and covers addition and subtraction of decimals (money), range and mean, and scale drawings. Great for horticulture students or anyone with an interest in gardening.
The problem solving nature of many questions and the drawing a scale diagram task also makes this ideal for E3-L1 Functional Maths.

Area of circles and triangles provides straightforward but very useful practice with working with formulae and using Pi. 2 pages plus answer sheet.

Cocktail and smoothie ratios is a wonderful way to introduce ratio and proportion (also covers converting measures). Choose your favourites from the ‘menu’, work out ratios for the ingredients and calculate amounts required for multiples such as 6, 10 and 20 drinks, make up your own cocktail.
Adapted from Jodie Travis’s original version (see below). This adapted version includes a wider range of non-alcoholic cocktails / smoothies for students that do not drink alcohol.
Also ideal for underpinning L1-2 Functional Maths.

FDP Happy Families card game is a great way to reinforce and assess learners’ knowledge of fraction-decimal-percentage equivalents. 
With detailed instructions and ideas for alternative games.

Editor's note. Now fully updated to reflect the new 2018 Functional Skills content that comes into effect September 2019.

A fun paired dice game that really gets across the meaning and purpose of finding the mode, median and range of a set of data. Great for footie fans – who can choose their own name for the home team.