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
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!
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.
