Day 8

During the first session we had a discussion with John Fanagan, who is a retired teacher of English and has been actively involved in Irish politics. He was the personal advisor of Taoiseach (Prime Minister of Ireland) Garret FitzGerald. He talked a lot about Irish politics and history and gave us a deeper insight into the Irish voting system. It was a really informative session and we had the opportunity to ask him questions related to anything we were interested in related to Ireland.

The next session was about creative writing ideas. We looked at multiple activities that we could use with our students. We saw a great page where we can find useful teaching materials related to Irish legends. We looked at an activity called ‘I come from’ which was based on a trailer of a film called We are poets. We started with a listening activity and continued it as a creative writing activity. We needed to write a similar text about ourselves and it was really interesting to listen to our colleagues’ descriptions of their living places.

We also explored Irish proverbs and worked on limericks. We looked at some examples and then we wrote our own ones. We also collected ways of using them in the classroom.

During the afternoon session we focused on Irish food and drink. This topic was not originally included in the programme of the course but we asked our teacher, Ann Marie to talk about it a little bit and she very kindly agreed. We looked at a matching activity about typical Irish food and drinks and then in small groups we carried out our own research on specific dishes. We also talked about our national dishes and shared our personal preferences with each other. After the session we stayed a bit to work on our group project because tomorrow we will have to present our findings in a 10-minute presentation.