Advantages of the back catalogue
So this weeks theme is evaluations! I can sit in front of students from now until next June to tell them they are improving and they will never believe me... So they need to see it form themselves. The easiest way to do this apart from the evaluations we do at the end of the term where they ask themselves what has changed... what is easier.. what can they now do and so on - is to simply get them to bring in their work from this time last year! They will instantly see how much better they can now write - how much longer their answers are - Simply how much more they know!
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
Innovative lesson for an Abacus
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.
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!
Regional Geography with Flashcards
This lesson is devised by Danielle O' Connor who studied English and Geography in NUI Maynooth. She graduated from Maynooth in 2009. She is currently studying a Higher Diploma in Primary Education. Danielle loves most sports and is a black belt in kickboxing and teaches Boxercise classes. She says "Exercise is a brilliant way to take your mind off your studies. she finds, Children that take part in sports concentrate better in the classroom. It also helps to reduce stress"
The main aim of this lesson is that Students will focus on two European regions, one core region (The Paris Basin) and one peripheral region (The Mezzogiorno). It can be hard to remember all the facts so Danielle has devised a clever flash card system to help!
Students compare these contrasting regions in terms of:
Physical environment- soil, drainage, relief and climate.
Primary economic processes- farming and fishing.
Secondary economic processes- Multinational companies, high tech companies and communication systems.
Tertiary economic processes- services, education and tourism.
Human processes- population and migration.
As prep you will need to take two contrasting regions and write a series of flash cards for the topics above. Try to pick out all the opposites!
Learning your own mistakes
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.
