Puppet Workshop – creating characters with stories
This lesson is created by Sinead Cunningham who is an Arts facilitator.
As a practising Artist she creates an abundance of crafts, paintings and also makes music.
Her Art is ever evolving so to find out more follow her Facebook Page
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
Ireland as a land of Learners
One of the great difficulties of education is we try to fit everyone in to the same box - it's generally accepted that this doesn't happen but - there's the "but" how else can we teach the masses?
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
DNA extraction of a kiwi plant in The Homework Club kitchen
Lesson devised by Graham Huges who has taught maths, science, computers and biology at The Homework Club for the last two years.
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.
Mocks and the sky falling in – Chicken Licken Syndrome
I have written about the mocks before, the top tips of why we do them and how we get through but this year I'd like to write on something slightly different. The "Chicken-Licken-syndrome" where students seem to genuinely feel like the sky is falling in on top of them! The mocks are a test run - you are meant to make mistakes.. that's the whole point of doing them!
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
