The following is a review of a visit to Victoria Baths, written by Sue Bell, a Skills for Life tutor from Chorlton Workshop, Manchester. Sue has included some useful ideas on activities to help develop literacy, language and numeracy skills. You will also find some downloadable numeracy resources in the panel on the right. These were written and produced by Jackie Walker, a Numeracy Tutor from Chorlton Workshop.

"On Tuesday 23rd May 2006 a group of approximately twenty-five learners from Chorlton Workshop paid a visit to Victoria Baths. The group was composed of learners from our literacy workshops and numeracy workshop. In the lead up to the visit we used a range of swimming-related images found on the Internet, from old black and white images of outdoor lidos, to modern swimming baths and seaside images from around the world. These acted as a stimulus for discussion in the literacy workshops around memories of swimming, and generated short pieces of free writing around this topic. In the numeracy workshop we used information found in copies of documents, relating to the running of the baths and other facts and statistics, to compile composite worksheets matched to the Adult Numeracy Core Curriculum, Entry Level 3 to Level 2. Just prior to the visit we received a copy of the newly developed Victoria Baths Quiz and so took paper copies of this with us on the day of the visit.

The visit itself was a really enjoyable experience. Di Terry gave us a full and interesting tour of the building - I'm sure that if tutors had an idea of the content of Di's talk, the tour could be utilised for speaking and listening accreditation. At the end of the tour, literacy learners were given a copy of the quiz and were able to roam the building to find answers to the questions. Numeracy learners were given a quiz which had been designed by our numeracy tutor and were also able to wander the baths with tape measures, calculating the width and length of a range of objects. I feel there is great value attached to this kind of situated, context-based literacy and numeracy learning. Tutors can find out a lot more about their learners by observing and listening to them away from the classroom."