A Little Extra Help in the Classroom

Variety Ireland is passionate about helping children who may require additional supports with learning inside the classroom. We recognise the essential duties that every teacher carries out on a daily basis, in helping children with learning difficulties. This might include children arriving from countries outside of Ireland who need a little help with learning English. It may also include helping children with learning difficulties, or simply children who are eager to learn.

Our “Heart of Learning Programme” provides upcycled iPads to schools across Ireland who may need that little bit of extra help and care. By providing an iPad to National Schools, we hope that we can help in some small way to make learning more accessible to some. It’s even better when the schools we help reach out and show us exactly how they are putting iPads they received from us to good use.

Here for example is a beautiful testimonial and photos showing how pupils in Kiltormer National School in Ballinasloe, Co Galway are benefiting from our programme. While our charity is limited with resources of the amount of schools we can help, we will always try where possible to step in and assist children with their educational needs.

“Dear Variety Ireland,

We wanted to thank you most sincerely for sending us the gift of two iPads for. The iPads are extremely useful in our school.

First of all we have 72 children and we had only 11 iPads between all of them. Your two extra will help reduce the pupil iPad ratio.

Secondly the iPads are used by all of the children in all of the classrooms to enhance their learning. Pupils as young as Junior infants use iPads to record their creative work in construction and art. Senior infant children record themselves reading and use them for word games.  First and second classes use them for maths and English games to consolidate their tables and help with new concepts.

3rd to 6th use iPads for dictionary work, research, spellings and typing. There are some very useful apps such as snap type and Siri (speech to text) which help children with difficulties in writing and spelling.

Our Ukrainian pupils find the iPads very useful for translating the content of our curriculum into their own language. They also use Say Hi to translate on the iPads.

We would like to thank all at Variety Ireland once again and we are extremely grateful for your generosity.

Yours sincerely,”

Eimear Mahony (Principal)