School bags, School copybook, and Writing lessons
It's that time of year again when everyone has gone off to school with a new bag, new pens, new pencils and new copy books and new books!
We are always complaining about the weight - but has anyone looked at the contents?
I wish I could change it every year... My favourite part of going back to school - the only part I enjoyed was the new pens, markers and coloured stationary my Gran Aunt gave me from her shop in Tipperary. I blame her partly for my love of colour stationary but I also know its vital to my learning as a highly visual learner.
There is not enough colour in our school bags! All I would like to see is colour, colour, colour. Coloured pens, markers, and most importantly coloured paper.
The worst colour to write with is black and the worst paper to read from is white. Why then are we in 2012 still using these tools?
The paper is school copybooks is too small. For many a student the paper becomes an obstacle that constrains them not a wonderful blank canvas to create on. The lines are too constraining - it's all about being tidy and neat and ordered... Not about what wonderful concepts, connections or ideas or inspirations you are having in the classroom.
I would love to see constructive doodling on a minimum of A4 paper and bigger a standard practise.
We have shown over almost 4 years of work with students including many with severe learning difficulties that making the area larger, removing the lines and adding colour opens up a whole world of written expression for them.
Similarly if we want there to be a great deal of structure and to make out a plan we use highly organised paper, squared paper! Still it's not a linear exercise - we don't want linear thinking, therefore we NEVER use Lined paper!
I have known many of our students to be given out to from drawing in class - these students need to create visual maps to remember by - its instinctive for them. They all grow up to be notebook lovers - they go everywhere with one and are always drawing ideas, maps, brainstorms and doodles in meetings and on the phone for the test of their lives - so why not at school?
I have never understood the point of hand writing? It only works for a small percentage of students. The rest are left feeling they can't "write" no they can't form letters in a very limited obsessively structured copybook! Many of these students fail to make the connections on bigger and smaller letters, the order of the alphabet, how the letters are formed, what words start with these letters and of course they stop trying to write creatively because they can't "write"
If we suddenly have them make the letters from play-dough, make connections to well know words, work on large coloured paper and use stencils to show the formation of the letters - they suddenly become masters!
Why do we have to do joint writing? We don't type jointed? No one easily can read joint? We don't read books in joint writing? What is the obsession with joint writing? For some students who have finally grown confidence in themselves and finally feel they have a voice and are creative we now move the "goal posts" once more and make them feel this magic art of "writing" is beyond them.
This reminds me of a very well used example of continuing behaviour through suggestion. It means we never ask why we do something we just follow the order. A woman cooks Sunday roast and cuts the two ends off the meat before she puts it into the pot. Her husband over dinner asks why she cut the ends off - her mother is also at the dinner and the wife says 'because that's what mum did' - so the husband asks her mother who responds because 'that's the way my mother cooked it' - rarely it turns out the great grandmother is alive and so they ring her and ask her why she cut the ends off to cook the roast? The answer - 'because my pot was too small' so three generations of people have cooked the roast the same way never asking why they cut the ends off!
I feel much of modern education can be attributed to the same suggestive behaviour. I'll continue in the next article why I feel the books shouldn't be in the bag...
Dr Naoisé O'Reilly (Expression Developist™)
The Homework Club’s journey into Confidence Club
As We re-locate to Dublin City Centre this August it seems a good time to reflect on All that We have created and achieved here at The Homework Club in just over 3 years.
Our main purpose for re-locating is to have access to many more Students and to focus on what We really love and have developed from Our experience over 3 and a half years.
I have attached some short video clips that sum up some of what We have achieved and some of the outstanding feedback We had from the Students We have worked with. As there are 500+ Student feedback comments it’s not possible to include them all. But I wished to attempt to give You a sense of what We have developed in this short amount of time.
In setting up The Homework Club I always wished to create an environment where We all continued to learn. The hugely committed Tutors and Students needing support. I would like to think that Everybody has expanded Their horizons by being part of this experience - including Me.
In just 3 and a half years We have not only helped and supported these Students in Their lives and education - We have taken Our experiences to create 2 more projects to take all of Our dreams in. The Purple Learning Project, www.purplelearning.ie and Confidence Club, www.confidenceclub.ie
In setting up The Homework Club there have been 2 main differences in Our approach to education. Firstly, the way We have gone about making education accessible to all of Our Learners. We have achieved this by using Our own unique learning method - now known as The Purple Learning Project. This is now the outreach element that is allowing us to take Our methods back into all education environments through Our own Workshop experiences.
Secondly, We have always had different objectives and perceptions of what success is for Students. We have always felt that not only are students always good at something but They should be able to use these talents to be good at everything. The Confidence Club is about allowing us to step away from the traditional expectations of success in education and allowing all Our students to fulfil Their dreams - no mater how crazy they may seen now.
Our first Confidence Club Workshop takes place this August.
Confidence Club Workshop August 2012 – Primary to Secondary School Transition.
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
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!
