Then we draw up our puppet and write a short story about our character.

I really like this lesson because it appeals to both practical students and kinaesthetic ones - you make a puppet to tell a story and write around the making - a great way to get over the blank page but also there is a personal character for the puppet, a way to have real emotions in a physical way beyond the 2-D story! Dr. Naoisé

Well that's the 1st mistake - thinking about the "teaching". If we instead look at the learners - the students and look at the world from their perspective we may begin to not only accommodate everyone but have them reach their full potential. Most of all have them be happy and enjoy doing it!

So if we take the learning nation of Ireland - what are they like?

Well we have a nation of sociable chatterboxes that have a huge number of successful athletics when you think about the size of the country.  We make an impact wherever we go. We are also very generous again for the size of Ireland we contribute hugely in charity donations, peace keeping and volunteer work . We are hugely proud of anything irish!

So in simple terms that makes us Auditory, Kinaesthetic learners that need huge amounts of encouragement and praise. We really care about what everyone thinks of us, so like most other parts of the world we are a largely extrovert society. We need to work with others in social settings.

The hugely interesting fact about auditory learners is that they don't need to just listen - they need to talk as well! The idea of them starting school at 5 and learning to be quiet is ridiculous. We work our way through so much in Ireland by gossiping. The chatty taxi driver, the toilet queue or the local shop. It makes us able to cope with the weather if nothing else. One of the real difficulties with being an auditory leaner (besides just being in trouble for talking all the time) is the rambling way we work - there is no structure. This is the most common difficult many of our students have - especially all the talky kinaesthetic boys who are brilliant on the sports pitch and feel rubbish at everything else in school - they simply have no idea how to structure an answer or to focus their thoughts on to the page. It's ok to write the way you talk too.

The best way to work with auditory kinaesthetic learners is through role plays - this is sociable group work that allows us to talk out scenarios - we get to put ourselves in the situation - we all do great in this part of the oral exams! We are a country with lots of political views - it's important for us to get to talk about these! Students drop off the chairs when we ask them what they think - but it is so much easier to write about what you feel, especially when this is what matters to you when your kinaesthetic. Normally boys just get to run this off on the sports pitch rather than working through it in English or History class!

It's equally important to allow us to talk about it in our own way - The Irish have a great "gift of the gab" - the wit that has a name for every object, landmark and sculpture! We talk about creativity and innovation - this is a wonderful example of innovation with words! We can express any situation as a joke.

We have always been gifted story tellers - young kids who start school before they are made to feel self conscious about talking have this in bucket fulls.

We are hugely competitive - hence the sports heroes - the mark we leave what ever we have set our mind too ... Competition is such a great way to inject energy to any learning environment.

There is a pride deeply engrained in Irish and as a result we can never cope with being made a fool of in public - we may try to joke and slag our way out of any situation but it hurts deeply. Everyone I have ever spoken to in this country has a school story where they lost face - they never forget!

This is why we have to focus on the learners always - the real people we are helping to grow and develop. Every one is different but we all fall into patterns of behaviour that can be accommodated but you can't just take an education model from one country to another and expect it to work - especially since the models are always developed for the teachers and governments not the students. I have really begun to feel like The Lorax - who speaks for the (trees) students! There are very simple patterns and learning styles but you have to look for them and you have to use each nations strengths and values to achieve what is important for them!

Dr. Naoisé

Graham Hughes is studying a PhD in Bioinformatics at UCD. He is interested in Science, particularly biology and believes with the correct approach, science can be made accessible and enjoyable to all students. Graham also works on computer techniques to make students more motivated to do well in mathematics.

DNA, DNA come out and play...

If you were to zoom in closely on a piece of your skin, you would see it is made up of millions of cells. If you were to zoom in on a cell you would see it is made up of smaller organelles. If you were to zoom in on certain organelles you would see that they contain DNA. DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid and is made up of long strands of the letters A,T,G and C. The arrangement of all these letters in your DNA is the ‘recipe’ for you.

All animals and plants have DNA in their cells. By using household materials we managed to extract and view some of the DNA in a kiwi! Even though you cannot even see kiwi cells with the naked eye, with the tricks of the trade, we can gather enough DNA to make it easily visible. All it takes is a little chemistry...

Firstly we need to make an ‘extraction buffer’. This involved putting water in a plastic cup, adding 2 small sachets of salt and putting 2 squirts of hand soap, giving it a good mix. The soap breaks up the fatty kiwi cell membranes and the salt makes the DNA clump together.

Next, we mashed up some of the kiwi (the mashier, the better!) and added this mash to the extraction buffer. Kiwi’s are ideal as they have their own special enzymes that break down proteins attached to the DNA.

The kiwi-extraction mix needs to be placed at 60 degrees to break down the cell wall letting the DNA out. To achieve this, we boiled some water in the homework club kettle,letting it cool a little. We incubated our cups in this water for 15 minutes. Afterwards, the mixture was poured over some coffee filter paper to remove the chunks of kiwi.

The final stage of the DNA extraction involved adding some ice cold methylated spirits by pouring it slowly down the side. Since it is less dense than the mixture, it forms a liquid layer that the DNA floats in. The transluscent jelly-like stuff we now see floating in this layer is the kiwi DNA.

By using very basic materials, a kiwi and some methylated spirits, we managed to isolate some DNA in our homework club kitchen - something done a large scale in research labs across the world!

For some of The Students at The Homework Club this happens in a more spectacular fashion. I myself did very badly in my mocks as do many students with learning difficulties. As the department of education has not granted who will and will not receive accommodations in their exams, very few if any schools allow these students to sit their exams in a similar environment to how they will in June. We are overwhelmed by the exam hall experience - I'm conducting some research at the moment in why some students are hyper-sensitive and how this can helped. We don't have a reader and hence we read the questions wrong, we take the wrong meaning and we answer a completly different question. Some studnets haven't got to grasp with the whole course in one "bulk" form - they are struglign to put all the secitons together and maybe they haven't covered their best seciton yet! No one tells you how to sit an exam and for some studets who really do need to do a visual map of the answer and the question, this is highly discouraged and implied to be a waste of time when it's not as all - it's a vital way of thinking for them! If you are going to use a laptop maybe you didn't get to do this in the mocks.. there are so many factors as to why students find exams hard.

I call this time of the year "crushing season" because I watch the students who we have built up since September lose complete confidence in their abilities. We have to build them up again from the floor. I really question at this stage if the mocks are a good exercise at all? Surely there must be a better way to have a test run?

The sky really isn't falling in and there is loads of time left to fix the mistakes - but it is very hard to show people your mistakes when you are made to feel so bad for making them.

Dr. Naoisé O'Reilly

A short clip of some of our very valuable findings at The Homework Club

Yes it is that easy to boast confidence - we always forget to go back and look where we have come from...it's like going back and reading your old diaries to let you see the journey you have been on....This also ties in nicely with an earlier article I wrote on looking for your mistakes. We only get to know our mistakes when someone shows them to us. By knowing our common mistakes we can learn from them and most importantly for dyslexic spectrum students we can learn to look out for those ones! I know always look for "fro" in my emails - the spell checker never finds it for me - but I do

Dr. Naoisé O'Reilly

I set the team a task of thinking of an innovative lesson or use of a new toy, abacus - especially not for maths!

Rachel was thinking about using it for younger kids as a way of measuring progress/encouraging them to push themselves. If a student is having particular trouble writing, you could use it to build up the number of sentences/words they'll write and if they're having trouble reading you could use it to get them to read more paragraphs/pages/poems and so on!

So all the beads would be on the left hand side on the first day. You'd get them to read or write as much as they're willing to. Then you would move one bead from the top row to the right hand side for every sentence written/poem read etc.

The next day you would reset the abacus to show how they got on the week before and then challenge them to do better, so maybe this time you will move three beads over instead of two. As the weeks go on they will be able to clearly see that they are improving and hopefully they will be motivated to beat their own scores!

Brilliant - Just the sort of idea I was looking for!

I have to ask why you would use such a term to describe situation that is suppose to offer help and support to students? Last term I asked the students here to give me key words to describe their experiences at The Homework Club. The words I got back were: helpful, supportive, fun, relaxed, enjoyable, super, colourful, creative and feel more confident.

I was delighted to hear theses words as they are the ones I would aspire to have associated with the project. I think the only thing that "grinds" in The Homework Club are my teeth every time I hear the phrase!

Naoisé

The Homework Club takes a more holistic approach to study. “We try to develop the skills for life, explain’s Naoisé” Before starting with each student together we assess their strengths, aptitudes and potential to guide the students towards an achievable goal, one they desire and enjoy. “We feel everyone is not only good at something but can use this to do anything, says Naoisé”

We don’t believe in cram learning and unnecessary stress, explains Naoisé. The best analogy I can give you is making an omelette. If you wanted to make an omelette you wouldn’t worry about what goes in to it, you just simply open the fridge and see what’s to hand. We never worry about learning off cookbooks. For everyday meals we simply know from experience what works and may just check a few details like the temperature and cooking time. Study is exactly the same regardless of the subject. If you understand it and can relate to the material in a way there is no need to learn off endless information. You simply need to develop your own skills to remember the important details like the cooking time! The rest will come naturally.

Similarly in this current climate it’s possible that you will get slightly challenging exam papers in June. This has happened for a number of years now and seems to coincide with the increased pressure in the education system. We try to develop coping strategies in our students so they can survive in these situations. To go back to our omelette analogy, you should find yourself in a position in the exams to simply open the fridge in your mind and pull out whatever ingredients you need. Being able to stay calm and focused, work your way out of the situation and relate what you do know to the questions you are being asked. These are not only skills for the Leaving Certificate but for life after. We have seen almost all of our students thrive in the last three years with this very simple outlook.