http://www.spraoiville.com/

There was a citydeal on this recently and we bought this for €22 instead of the usual €49.95 for a year's subscription. It is great fun and suitable for primary school children. There is a virtual community and your character can go in and out of shops, restaurant, hairdressers etc. If you do some of the lessons in the school (a variety of subjects, but obviously all as Gaeilge) and get them right, you win points and you can spend these points like money in the shops.

My seven year old is really enjoying it. It is worth checking out. You can have a brief look at the world without paying, but you cannot really do much unless you buy membership, minimum €4.95 for one month.

Saoirse

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The citydeal is on again. It is certainly worth having a look.

http://www.groupon.ie/deals/east-coast- ... 133&a=1223

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There's just one remark I'd like to make about this kind of thing and it's this - as much as possible I try to use visual and audio materials that are real - where you hear and see real children behaving normally, lots of photos of real objects, real animals and so on.

I absolutely agree with you. The reason I introduce things like this is because I try to have as many things as possible available to my children in Irish because they are all available in English, everywhere they look. I am trying to show that English is not the main language in their lives (although I think I'm fooling myself a bit on that one). In our house, our children have many, many books in Irish, cds, a couple of cd roms, posters, games, dvds, tee-shirts and anything else we can get our hands on - random things like a map on the wall, a globe, a calendar, teddy bear (Bábog Baby) (I'm frantically looking around to see what there is!).

Having said all that, for every tee-shirt they have in Irish, they have seven or eight in English. For every dvd they have in Irish, they have a dozen in English. The ratio of books is much better - we have spent a small fortune making sure they have loads in Irish, but it is still probably 2:1 or 3:1 in favour of English.

Computers and the web are full of resources in English and I don't want them to think that technology is only English language based. I understand your point absolutely, but that rather long ramble is the rationale behind why something like that helps us to 'normalise' the use of the language. I should add that we speak only Irish to our children so they get the 'real' stuff every day too! (I can almost sense Lughaidh shuddering at the dodgy grammar they are being indoctrinated with!!!)

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You can always adapt materials such as card games, dominoes, flashcards and board games srl from one language to the other. One thing I often find myself doing is changing numbers to written numbers on materials such as bingo or lotto or - on clock faces (that really does annoy me) for example. Anyway I'm glad to see that they've finally got round to persuading Dorling Kindersley to allow some of their books to be published in Irish. This is taken from the 'See how they grow' series - Ainmithe Feirme - Tá mé ag fás - translated by Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin.
http://www.cic.ie/item.aspx?id=1921

We have them and they are great, as is everything by Futa Fata.

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