IrishHomework is a blended learning one-stop-shop for primary school Irish.
Before in-class work begins lesson content is learned at home.
In-class practice can be effective with as little as 10 minutes, 3 days a week. A selection of our lessons have a full Task Based Learning(TBL) plan built in, including task materials and assessment (30-50 mins). This is a perfect compliment to the work students do at home and serves as a guide should you choose to incorporate your own TBL material.
It's very important to complete the training provided to help you build your TFL skills. A TFL approach to in-class activities is the best way to encourage your students to use the Irish they have learned at home.
Feedback from all our teachers indicate that 3 sessions of 10 minutes each is the optimum amount of time for activation work during class time.
This typically entails a task based activity, debate or acting out the dialogue as a drama.
Keeping the time to just 10 minutes is sufficient to achieve activation. More than 10 minutes runs the risk of students quickly becoming bored and loosing focus.
You may also include certain pre or post tasks but it is ESSENTIAL that you do not begin to teach content as this will unravel your flipped classroom where all students get their homework done as a pre-requisite to taking part in in-class activities.
YES.
Both the previous and current curriculum go to great lengths to emphasize the importance of the spoken language in primary school Irish. Emphasis on practicality and fluency.
We have gone to great lenghts to follow curricular guidance in terms of content and pedagogy.
From the outset we restrict the lexicon to the most frequently used spoken Irish. Our lessons strive to ensure that the basics are mastered before progression.
As a direct result of this students will feel progress comes easy and they can reuse everything they learn frequently.
Just as a child learns their mother tongue, the grammatical structures build up in a students mind quite naturally through repetition and self/peer correction. Combined with the careful selection of incremental grammatical comlexity in our lesson sequencing. Hours of learning (and forgetting) grammar the hard way is dispensed with thus avoiding lost motivation and momentum.
As with a lot of what we do here at IrishHomework.ie our advice on this may seem a little counter intuitive.
First of all, its important to remember to have a laser focus on what you are learning "this week".
Having lists of words around the classroom is actually counter productive as it takes your students minds off current work. Consider for example taking down every labelled noun you can find.
In fact the use of any Irish that does not come under "this week's" direct lexicon will simply diminish your rate of progress. It distracts and confuses. Rather than creating a richer Irish environment as one might think it creates a diluted Irish environment.
You might consider having an image board that prompts emotions or actions closely linking this week's lesson with last week's.
When communicating with your students keep recycling the words that are currently showing up in your Teacher Dashboard Word Cloud.
The content is suitable for students from 1st class up.
Our lessons are divided into three main levels. Whether your spoken Irish is weak or strong we recommend going through all the lessons in Level 1 before moving up to Level 2 or 3.
Older students should be able to quickly work through the easier content and make their way up to Level 2 where the themes are more interesting for older children.
There are some lessons at level 4 which remain hidden to students until set by teacher as they contain some subject matter that require group discussion.
The Status Dots capture at a glance if the student has comprehensively completed their homework and how well they participate during in class practice
Score < 40% results in a red dot,Score between 40% and 80% earns an orange dot. Score > 80% earns a green dot.
Setting a Lesson performs a number of your important weekly tasks
Lessons that are TBA ready have this icon as a watermark 
visble when setting a lesson from our lesson library. Take a look at the top right of this image so you know what to look out for.
When working on such a lesson you have the opportunity to carry out Self Assessent with a selection (or all) of your students.
From your Teacher Dashboard click into a student view and then select Report Mode. From there you will find the Self Assessment button displayed (if your current lesson is TBA ready).
You can keep track of who has done their assessment by toggling the icon on the main Teacher Dashboard.
The assessment process helps students understand the benefits of doing the activities well. It also serves as useful feedback for parents. (And teachers of course).
Your child will ...
...learn Irish as a spoken language through our focused approach on spoken Irish and the activation of this Irish in class in 3 ten minute sessions per week.
...begin to enjoy Irish through being able to use it to communicate with classmates.
...pass oral and aural exams easily. The standard curriculum will make more sense and be much easier to learn after Irish has become an active language for your child.
...spend much less time on Irish and have more time for other subjects or activities.
Your child will be set lessons by their teacher.
They should only spend 10 minutes on the site for their homework. We recommend 3 days a week. This will be dictated by the teacher however as this site serves as actual homework. Teachers can accurately view a students activity on the site. They can also measure their scores and see which vocabularly students are struggling with.
More than 10 minutes per night, 3 times a week can lead the students to become disinterested and loose focus. Every 10 minute session should be intense and the object is always to learn all of the content on every lesson, thoroughly.
Only you, your childs teacher and the site moderators can view your childs use of the site.
We don't share any information with third parties for any purpose.
Most parents who have been through the Irish education system will have a large amount of "dormant" Irish. We recommend you get stuck in with your child and practice their lessons with them. You'll be amazed how quickly you'll activate your own Irish.
Our site is designed to allow your child to learn autonomously. It will still help them however if you show an interest and perhaps encourage them to focus on mastery of the lesson before trying to get 100% in the lesson tests.
Clicking on this link will bring you to our reset password page Reset password
You can create your new password by clicking on the link in the email we send you.
No, any internet enabled device is ok.
Using a computer is probably the best way to use out site. All other devices work fine though even if you have to scroll around the screen a bit.
The most important thing is that you have either a good mobile network connection (at least 3G) or a good broadband connection (at least 1Mbit/s). Otherwise you will have to be a little patient while the lesson page loads. When you click on a button give it a moment to respond.
Yes. You can attempt the Game and Test of each lesson as many times as you like.
Please remember that the test is designed to prevent you from getting a good score until you understand the Dialogue and Key Examples completely.
If you get a 100% without knowing the lesson well, let us know so we can make the test harder. :)
No. Only your teacher can see your activity and scores.
Every week we take a few marks off your lesson scores.
Lessons with a high score only have 1% taken off.
Lessons with a medium score have 3% taken off.
Lessons with low scores have 5% taken off.
You can loose a lot of marks if you have several lessons with low scores.
After several weeks one of your high scored lessons might fall into the medium score category, in this case you will need to refresh this lesson in your mind, and do the test again.
High score lessons will stay in the Coasting Zone even if they are going down just a little each week. When they reach Medium score level they will appear in the Dropping Zone.
We like to keep everything in English when it comes to finding your way around the site.
If we tell you exactly what you get wrong in the test then some students would just do the tests over and over, learn how to pass the tests, and not learn the lesson properly.
Instead we just show you your score for each section of the test. You can see these section scores when you submit your test BEFORE you click OK on the result.
If you don't get a high enough score, you need to learn the lesson more carefully. :)
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