Adult Numeracy, Functional Maths, and GCSE Resources

An activity to explore money management and negative numbers. Be prepared to signpost students if need be.

The activity starts with discussing who is most likely to get into debt and then by recognising that anyone can if they don’t have good money skills.

A game to help learners get to grips with the likelihood of selecting a particular thing at random. Students practise expressing probabilities as fractions, decimals and percentages. This activity avoids the taboos on dice and cards that some learners have. It also revises concepts such as multiples and “greater” and “less than”.

1 page cards to be cut out – give one set to each student (or pair of students), 1 page for student to complete, plus an answer sheet.

Place value starter based on an Open University course activity.

Useful as a carousel activity at the start of a lesson. Could be adapted for E2 by using 2 boxes rather than three. You may want to laminate the second page.

A detailed lesson plan accompanied by a PPT and a lesson objective checker sheet. The lesson recaps place value and introduces students to decimals and using money in practical situations.

A set of cards where learners have to find fractions of money. I use this as a paired game where the learners share the cards between them, then both turn over one cardeach. They work out how much their card is worth then the “winner” or person whose card is worth more keeps both cards. Play continues until 1 player has all the cards.

Useful to assess learning or for ESOL numeracy students. Learners need to match words and definitions. Laminate or print onto some good quality card to use again and again.

This worked well as a bit of revision on measuring for a mixed class E2-L2. Also makes a good warm-up activity.
I’ve used different colours for easier and harder answers, so you can differentiate when you give the cards out (blue ones are supposed to be a bit easier, red ones a bit harder, and purple in between).

Super set of 15 multiple choice literacy questions followed by 15 multiple choice numeracy questions. All cleverly based on the accompanying text about Led Zeppelin: ‘I come from Ice and Snow’, Led Zeppelin 1970. Written as revision material for L2 Access to Music students but suitable for any learners with an interest in music.
The literacy questions cover comprehension, spelling, vocabulary and purpose of text. Numeracy covers money, time, scale maps, substitution, percentages, area, range, median, and conversions.

‘I have…Who has?’ is a fast-paced coin counting game that has been adapted from a game on Super Teacher Worksheets

For the game to work correctly all of the worksheets need to be distributed to your students so some students may get more than one card. This could be used as a way to differentiate with the higher level students being given more cards to work with.

A set of posters / cards / checklists designed to prompt discussion, check learning and keep a record of student progression. Designed for Entry Level Functional Maths and English learners in an FE setting but suitable for all levels and subjects.
This resource was inspired by discussion on the NCETM (National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics) site about “understanding versus doing” and I would like to thank the forum members for their ideas and feedback.