"A fairly typical primary education in 80's Ireland left me with a lot of Irish learned but incapable of even a basic conversation" Robin Rynhart (Founder IrishHomework.ie)
"Thirty years later, I could see the exact same fate playing out for my own three children. Something had to be done to improve their Irish outcome."
We have removed all the unecessary hurdles to learning a language. Now the young learner's enthusiasm is channelled into achieving success in the shortest time frame and with reduced effort.
Success, is feeling like you can speak Irish right from the beginning. Early success motivates you to expand your knowledge of Irish without it feeling so difficult.
We applied modern language teaching methods using todays technology to create a web based platform that allows a flipped classroom solution.
The "flipped classroom" aproach is core to IrishHomework. Rather than asking teachers to deliver more, we offer a more efficient model. Giving children the ability to self study Irish content at home, in a fun way. Goal oriented, with user friendly tools. This allows teachers to use class time to "activate" the language learned. The real efficiency is achieved as a result of childrens Irish being activated, that is, transformed into a working language inside their mind. This makes it fun, it makes it stick, it creates a mental framework that is much much easier to build upon.
Teachers can see at a glance of their Teacher Dashboard which students have learned today's material, how successfully they have learned it and what if any issues they may be having with it. They can then create task based classroom activities for students to put "last nights lesson" into practice.
It could be as simple as students in pairs, re-enacting the dialogue in different characters, ( a granny voice and a Big Bad Wolf voice ), or with a slightly different task than that of the dialogue itself.
In this way, a teacher becomes a facilitator rather than an instructor. They can focus on bringing the Irish out of the students, encouraging them to speak freely and to make lots of mistakes. (Correcting is for multiple repeats of an engrained error only.)
Please take a look at our Teacher Training page for further guidance on the flipped classroom and how to activate and facilitate language learning during class time.