The Value of Going Back to Basics
This blog piece is written by Rachel Sneyd. Rachel is currently completing an undergraduate degree in History and Politics at Trinity College Dublin. She is a keen writer and has just submitted her first teen-fiction novel for publication.
The Value of Going Back to Basics
It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes in order to help a student move forwards you have to go backwards.
The roots of seemingly big problems are often found in basic gaps in knowledge that occurred months or even years before. For whatever reason a student doesn’t fully master a piece of information or skill. They can’t keep up with subsequent work that relies on them having this knowledge and they fall further and further behind. Their confidence is eroded and they are too embarrassed to ask for help with something they should already know. A simple gap, like not having fully grasped factorising in fifth class, becomes a big problem, like not being able to do Leaving Cert algebra.
Identifying these gaps and taking the time to fill them in, even if this means going backwards in the curriculum, can allow the student to finally catch up with their classmates.
There is also value in going back to a level of work that the student finds more manageable. They finally get a chance to be good at the subject and their confidence is built up. A third year student who thinks they are bad at English can excel at first year year level comprehensions. They can gradually be moved up to second and then third year work, often without realising that the work is getting harder. They have the confidence to attempt work they would have thought was impossible and even more importantly they expect to do it well because they have gotten used to succeeding.
Back to Basics: ABC’s
This blog piece is written by Rachel Sneyd. Rachel is currently completing an undergraduate degree in History and Politics at Trinity College Dublin. She is a keen writer and has just submitted her first teen-fiction novel for publication.
Young students (and not-so-young students) who have trouble reading and writing often struggle with the most basic building block of all: the alphabet. For some this means confusing Bs and Ds or forgetting what sound Q makes. For others it means not being able to identify more than a handful of letters. Not knowing the alphabet is a problem but luckily patience, revision and a bit of play-dough can make a big difference.
Aim: To revise the alphabet and build reading and writing confidence.
You need: Markers, coloured paper, play-dough, stencils.
Give the class the markers and coloured paper.
Write the day’s letters on the board and have the students copy them down. This works best if you break the alphabet up into manageable blocks and concentrate on 3 or 4 letters per lesson. It will take some time to get all the way to Z but the results are well worth it!
Learning your own mistakes
Writing Diary Entries and Speeches
This lesson is devised by Rachel Sneyd. Rachel is currently completing an undergraduate degree in History and Politics at Trinity College Dublin. She is a keen writer and has just submitted her first teen-fiction novel for publication. This lesson is one of two parts that Rachel won the recent Homework Club innovative teaching competition with.
You need a video clip of Martin Luther King\'s \"I have a dream\" speech, a video clip of a politician making a speech (I usually use the beginning of Obama\'s election night speech but any clip will work), an extract from "Bridget Jones\' Diary" by Helen Fielding, an extract from "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank.
Poetry Pictures
This lesson is one of three parts that won Conor the innovative lesson competition. Conor Sneyd has just finished his third year of studying English at Trintiy College. He's always loved English, because he's always loved reading, and he thinks that if Shakespeare was still alive he'd be annoyed that everyone takes him so seriously.
The aim of this lesson is to give students a way of summarising a poem, of picking out the most important quotes, and of remembering it better
The trickiest thing about Leaving Cert poetry is the number of poems which students have to learn. For example, for Higher Level, they have to prepare at least 5 poets (as only 4 out of 8 come up on the paper, so if they prepare less than 5 there’s no guarantee that any of the ones they’ve prepared will come up), and it is recommended that they prepare 4 to 6 poems per poet. This means that they’ll be learning a total of 20 – 30 poems, which is A LOT.
This is made even more difficult by the fact that poetry tends to be very abstract, and so it’s often hard for students to remember exactly what happens in a poem, and to be able to pick out what the important bits are.
Something I’ve found works well in making poetry easier for students is, with each poem we do, to have them identify the three scenes they think are most important in the poem, to draw a picture of each one, and to pick out a quote for each one. This makes them summarise the poem and identify the key quotes, and also gives them a visual presentation of the poem, which can really help them remember it.
For example for “The Tuft of Flowers” by Robert Frost is a long and tricky poem, about a rural worked whose solitary work makes him feel lonely, until he spots a butterfly which leads him to some flowers which someone else chose to leave standing instead of cutting them down, reminding him of the existence of other human beings and making him feel less lonely.
