Recently, I had two customers from two different schools book a customer care meeting with the exact same query in mind:

“I’m teaching in KS2, I have a child who is working well below age-related expectations. We have a Clicker subscription but I’m not sure how it can help this pupil!”

Both teachers described a child in their class with a complex profile. They were working in a Y5 classroom but couldn't access the curriculum independently, still working in the very early stages of writing. They’d both opened a Sentence Set from LearningGrids and found the pupil was unable to access it without support. One teacher said, “I know Crick Software pride themselves on the huge range of resources for all abilities. I know I must be missing something!”

Both teachers left their meeting feeling positive about next steps and being able to provide the right level of support for their learners. So, what did I show them and how can Clicker support pupils who aren’t working at age related expectations?

Editing a Sentence Set

As both teachers had mentioned Sentence Sets specifically, we started by looking at how to make this resource more supportive. One of the main issues they’re facing is that the pupils they’re working with are unable to decode vocabulary independently. So, I started by showing them how pupils can listen to any word read aloud using either right-click or SoundShift. This is great for encouraging learners’ independence and providing that extra layer of support.

Next, we talked about how these pupils weren’t yet confident in understanding the structure of a sentence. This made it tricky for them to attempt to build a simple sentence. To support emergent writers, I recommended turning on Guided Order in Edit View. This can be done for any Sentence Set, whether you’re using a ready-made resource from LearningGrids, or you’ve created your own. Guided Order guides learners through the sentence word by word. It only allows them to select the correct word, and add the punctuation at the end. Once the sentence is completed with punctuation, Clicker reads it back to them so they can hear a clear language model of a cohesive sentence. Sentence Sets typically contain several grids, meaning children can build up a meaningful piece of writing one sentence at a time.  

Both teachers were excited about this feature and the level of autonomy it opened up for their pupils. We went on to explore how you can also edit the text, colours and picture support within any writing grid, making it bespoke to individual learners’ needs. Learn more about this in our create and edit a Sentence Set tutorial.

Sorting activities

Next, the teachers asked if there were any other activities in Clicker that these learners could access independently. So, we looked at how you can create a sorting activity using a Clicker Board.

These activities are simple to use and really intuitive for children to access independently. They just need to click and drag an image into the correct place. There is a selection of ready-made sorting resources available in LearningGrids. It’s also really easy to create your own linked to your class topics or individual pupils’ targets.

They lend themselves to activities across the curriculum (I particularly like them for maths and science!) and can be as simple or complex as you need. They can include a combination of pictures, symbols and text and you can even add Voice Notes into a sorting activity, allowing learners to talk through their ideas rather than writing if needed.

Learners could be working on a phonics sorting activity, a Venn diagram linked to animals or materials, or maybe a shape sorting task in maths. I recently ran a mini-webinar talking through how to create a sorting activity from scratch, you can watch the recording here.

Speaking and listening activities

As well as writing support, we also discussed how Clicker can support children with their speaking and listening skills, especially when it comes to learning and consolidating new vocabulary, and orally rehearsing sentences.

I demonstrated how Talk Sets utilise the Voice Note tool and enable learners to talk about a topic or concept, or to rehearse vocabulary. They are particularly powerful for those learners who have lots of great knowledge verbally, but struggle to get those ideas down on paper due to the mechanics of writing.

Talk Sets are another flexible resource within Clicker. Some learners might use them as a rehearsal ahead of a piece of writing, or they could be a final piece of work for others. They can be utilised for simple words, or more complex vocabulary pupils are going to be encountering in a new topic or text. They can even be used to orally retell a story or recount a process!  

Speech supported books

Finally, we looked at how Clicker Books can allow children who are working below age related expectations to access text independently. Clicker Books are on-screen, speech-supported books that come with varying levels of complexity and are perfect for using across the curriculum. They can incorporate text, audio notes, pictures and even video!

On each page, learners can choose to listen to the text read aloud, so they can access the information independently and listen back as often as they need. This is great for providing an extra layer of support across different subjects. Perhaps you have a chapter of your class text added to a Clicker Book, maybe some information on your Geography topic so learners can do some independent research, or the steps for your next Science investigation.

A real benefit of Clicker Books is that there are also linked activities within LearningGrids. Learners can go from reading about a topic, to talking about the same topic in a Talk Set, then writing about it using a writing grid (maybe a Sentence Set in Guided Order!). These linked resources keep the text and images consistent, making it really simple for pupils to transition between activities.

For more information on how Clicker Books link to the different scaffolded writing frames, read this blog post.

Conclusion

This is just a snippet of ways you might use Clicker with KS2 children who are working below or working towards age related expectations. Every learner is different, but hopefully this blog post has inspired some ideas for new ways you might use Clicker with your pupils!

Clicker is a really flexible tool. There are so many resources available that can be used in lots of different ways, and we completely understand how it can be tricky to know where to start, especially when faced with a brand-new piece of software!

Our Customer Experience team are all ex-teachers. We’re more than happy to chat with you about how to get the most out of Clicker with specific pupils. If you have a Clicker subscription, you can book a customer care meeting with us.

To learn more about how Clicker can support your pupils, read these blog posts:

• Practical ways Clicker can simplify adaptive teaching
  
  
• Using Clicker for KS2 writing moderation
  
  
• How Clicker supports learners with SLCN

We love hearing from Clicker power users about how they bring Clicker to life in their classrooms and the clever tips they’ve discovered along the way.

In our latest conversations with three Crick Champions, they revealed their Clicker top tips and one quick win you can try in your own classroom.

We spoke with:

• Chris McCartney, Deputy Headteacher at Springfield House Community Special School
  
  
• Emma O’Monaigh, SENCo at Riverside Primary School
  
  
• Louise Turnbull, SEND Leader at Chapel Allerton Primary School

Can you share one top tip for using Clicker?

“Make use of Clicker no matter what ability your learners are.”

Chris’ top tip was linked to the vast range of resources within Clicker and how Clicker really is for everyone, making it perfect to use as part of your universal offer. He said:

“Make use of the variety of resources that Clicker offers to provide support for children at their level of development. Writing can really easily be personalised to challenge the oldest or most able learners, with expansive Word Banks to increase their use of descriptive or creative vocabulary.

Equally, we have pupils at the early stages of reading and writing that can be supported with a Sentence Set or Connect Set, that allows them to access language that they can understand, with pictures and speech feedback to support them in hearing if their sentences make sense.”

With Clicker’s range of scaffolding options, learners in the same lesson can work with resources tailored to their individual needs. You might have two learners sitting next to each other. They are both using Clicker, but each child is benefiting from a different level of support.

Emma provided us with some day-to-day practical top tips

1. Invest in headphones!

Emma’s first tip is simple, but really important in a busy classroom. With headphones, learners can use Clicker’s speech feedback without disrupting the lesson or letting their peers distract them.

This is also key for pupils’ confidence, as they can listen back to their writing, audio notes or key vocabulary as often as they need to.

2. Remember to save the resource and document separately

This is a very important point we always highlight in our training sessions! Your Clicker Document (where pupils have produced their writing) and the Clicker Set (the supporting resource) are two different files and you need to treat them separately when saving or printing them.

Imagine a learner is writing in their exercise book but has a vocabulary mat in front of them on the table, these are two different resources – it’s the same with Clicker, just on-screen!

Check out our saving and sharing guides for more information on this.

3. Use photos to personalise activities

It's easy to add your own photos to the resources in Clicker. You could insert photos as a prompt in a writing grid or Clicker Book, use photos of a class trip to support a recount in a Talk Set, or add photos you’ve taken of a science investigation in class that you want to sequence in a Clicker Board.

You can quickly browse the libraries on your device or take a picture in the moment using the device’s webcam.

Learn more about adding pictures in our tutorial.

Finally, Louise’s top tip was around the technology set-up in your classroom

Louise’s school have found it hugely beneficial to assign a specific iPad to a specific child.

Of course, this will depend on the devices you have available in school, but there are many benefits to doing this if you’re able to.

You can customise the settings in Clicker, so they’re bespoke for what individual learners need. Assigning a specific device to a pupil means that they will always have access to the tailored settings that work for them. For example, a certain background colour or font size, the speed of the speech feedback or the level of symbol support a child needs within Clicker.

Louise’s school make this work by putting coloured stickers or children’s names on iPads. Then, pupils know which colour sticker they’re looking for when collecting an iPad for the lesson.

What’s one thing you would recommend a school could do really easily with Clicker in their classrooms next week?

“Search LearningGrids – you’ve got thousands of ready-made resources and tasks that can be used instantly in lessons with no work required from staff. It will engage the children and get them used to the kind of resources that Clicker can offer, whilst at the same time building staff knowledge and confidence of the possibilities that Clicker has to offer.” – Chris McCartney

LearningGrids is a bank of ready-to-use resources included with your Clicker subscription. There are thousands of resources available to support learning across the curriculum. I always recommend that anyone new to Clicker takes some time looking through these resources as they’re a great place to start. As Chris says, the perfect way to familiarise yourself with the resources available.

For more information, watch our LearningGrids tour video.

“Create Word Banks!” – Emma O’Monaigh

Once you’re familiar with the ready-made resources, why not follow in the footsteps of Emma’s colleagues and create your own resources! You can create any resource from scratch, and we have tutorials to guide you through the process step-by-step.

Emma highlighted how useful it is to create your own Word Banks after a pre‑teach session. Staff can work with a group of children to generate ideas and vocabulary together. They can then quickly turn that into a Word Bank ready for the next lesson.

It’s quick and easy to create a Word Bank by adding your own vocabulary or copying and pasting text from another source.

This is just a snippet of the fantastic ideas our Crick Champions shared with us. Watch the recording to hear more top tips and how they’re planning to use Clicker moving forward.

Additional resources

Explore more top tips for using Clicker:

• Quick wins with Clicker’s writing support tools
  
  
• The Stour Academy Trust: Practical steps for success with Clicker
  
  
• Clicker success stories

Recently, I met with the headteacher of a school that is using Clicker really well, and their next goal is to implement Clicker within their Early Years classrooms. This led to a great conversation about how you might use Clicker at different points in the year. As we know, children make huge progress throughout their time in EYFS!

Prior to working at Crick, I taught across EYFS and Year 1 for ten years, so I’m always thinking of different ways to utilise Clicker with younger learners. Every child and every setting is different, and there are so many different ways you might use Clicker throughout the year, but I’ve collated a few examples of ways Clicker might be helpful term by term in an EYFS classroom.  

Autumn term

Settling in

Starting school can be daunting for lots of children, and EYFS staff are masters at easing that transition. There are so many new routines, rules, expectations, and names for children to learn when they start school, so how can Clicker support this transition?

In the School category on LearningGrids, there is a bank of great resources you can use to support children across the autumn term. These work perfectly on your interactive whiteboard if you want to share them as part of a whole-class activity. Alternatively, you can access them on individual devices if you’re supporting smaller groups or specific children.

You can use a Clicker Board to reinforce your classroom expectations, plan out your day, or encourage self-registration.

Reinforcement is key in the early days of starting school, so you can easily save or print your resources to revisit across the week.

I also recommend visiting the Feelings & Actions category. This is helpful at any point in the school year, but especially during the first term!

Use the writing grids to help children express their emotions and prompt discussion around their feelings. All these resources are speech-supported, so children can listen to any vocabulary read aloud.

One of my favourite things about Clicker’s ready-made resources is that there are also linked Clicker Books and Talk Sets, making it easy to plan a series of activities and support children in lots of different ways!

Phonics

Phonics resources are helpful at every stage of a child’s EYFS journey, and there are lots of amazing ways to use Clicker to support children with their phonics skills. These resources can be introduced in the autumn term, helping children to grow in confidence and independence when accessing them throughout the year.

The ready-made phonics resources are also grouped into cumulative letter groups, so the activities grow with your pupils as they develop their phonics skills

In the autumn term, children can explore from SATPIN and beyond using decodable books, Talk Sets, and simple writing activities.

From experience, I know that you’ll probably have many phonics activities you cycle between, websites you favour and schemes that you follow, but it’s always handy to have another great resource to throw into the mix!

These resources are perfect for consolidating new skills, rehearsing letter sounds and practising blending and segmenting skills.

Top tip: I’ve hosted a webinar on Clicker and phonics if you’re interested in finding out more!

Sentence structure

In any EYFS classroom, you’ll have a huge range of abilities and confidence when it comes to writing. For pupils who are ready, you can use a Sentence Set to support with modelling sentence construction. These simple writing grids enable children to build a sentence word by word. They are great for modelling writing left-to-right directionality, discussing finger spaces, and prompting children to use a full stop.

Children simply need to click words to add them to the Document and finish their sentence using the punctuation offered in the grid. When you add a full stop in Clicker, your sentence is automatically read back to you. This reinforces the value of adding a full stop, and children quickly learn that if they haven’t heard their sentence read back to them, they’re missing the punctuation!

This speech feedback is also an accessible way for children to check if their sentence makes sense. My teaching experience is all with younger children, so I know it can be difficult for children to read their own work back for lots of different reasons; Clicker’s speech feedback is a great way to give children some independence over proofreading their work.

Of course, not all children will be ready for this style of activity. So, I love the idea of doing this as a whole class with a resource displayed on your interactive whiteboard. This allows you to do some modelling first, perhaps deliberately making a mistake in your sentence, and encouraging children to be the teacher and correct the mistake.

You could also print, cut and laminate these resources for a practical sentence construction activity where children can physically move the words around.

Resource recommendations

Alongside transition activities and phonics resources, I really believe that many of Clicker’s resources add value to your classroom from day one. Clicker Books and Talk Sets are simple for children to use and work across a whole range of subjects and topics.

Some areas I recommend checking out on LearningGrids in the autumn term are:

• Collections - In this section, you’ll find resources for lots of the celebrations you’re likely to be exploring and setting up continuous provision for. For example, Halloween, Bonfire Night and Christmas.
  
  
• Nursery Rhymes & Songs - We have lots of brilliant resources linked to nursery rhymes. These are perfect for carpet times, early phonics skills, and intervention groups.

Spring term

By spring, many pupils will have found their feet in the classroom and be growing in confidence. You’ll be planning lots of meaningful opportunities for children to write and be working on encouraging their independence.  

The phonics resources and Sentence Sets I mentioned previously are still applicable in the spring term. However, you may be looking at introducing some different elements of Clicker or writing for different purposes.

Create your own books

One of my favourite ways to evidence children’s learning is by creating your own Clicker Books. This allows staff or children to create their own speech-supported books using audio notes, text, images and even video.

Your more confident writers can use the keyboard to get their ideas down. Learners who prefer dictation can use the Voice Note tool to record themselves talking through their ideas. This would work really well for exploring a topic you’re covering in class, retelling a story, or anything else children want to evidence!

You can add pictures and videos in the moment using the webcam on your device, providing an instant stimulus for writing. In my experience, children are much more enthusiastic when writing about real-life experiences and things they’re interested in.

This is a really flexible activity, so you could have some children retelling a story in their book and others talking about their trip to the park at the weekend or describing how they created a model in the construction area.  

Connect Sets

For those children who have become confident with using Sentence Sets, why not introduce a Connect Set! This is still a scaffolded writing frame, but it includes more words and phrases to choose from.

Connect Sets function similarly to Sentence Sets, but children have more autonomy over the ultimate outcome of their sentence. This is a great way to encourage children to think carefully over their vocabulary choices, whilst still paying attention to the structure of their sentence and adding in that full stop at the end.

You can add picture support to our resources too, further increasing children’s independence and increasing their understanding of new vocabulary.

Resource recommendations

Matching Sets would be my go-to activity throughout the year in Early Years. They really lend themselves to working on an interactive whiteboard, and children can access them independently within continuous provision.

Some LearningGrids resources I would use in the spring term include:

• Traditional Stories - These are a staple in an Early Years classroom! There are some brilliant resources to support children with reading, writing, and speaking and listening.
  
  
• Maths - I am always recommending the maths resources from LearningGrids. There are so many great activities for a range of different maths topics. I particularly like the shapes resources!
  
  
• Decodable stories - These Clicker Books are perfect for encouraging independent reading within the classroom.

Summer term

Before you know it, the summer term rolls around and you’re marvelling at the progress children have made across the year! You’ll be giving your pupils that final push with getting ready for Year 1, as well as fitting in all the fun activities that the summer term brings.

Top tip: we have a great blog post on supporting the transition from Reception to Year 1 with Clicker!

Preparing for year 1

In the summer term, I would still be using all the resources I mentioned previously. That’s one of the amazing things about Clicker: it’s perfect for supporting adaptive teaching and ensuring each child has a resource with the appropriate level of scaffolding.

Word Banks are a great way to support your more independent learners with spelling and vocabulary choices. They are an on-screen, speech-supported version of the vocabulary mats I know you’ll probably have printed around your classroom. They’re perfect for children who are confident with writing sentences independently but need encouragement to use more adventurous vocabulary.

You can also add picture support to Word Banks and print them out if you want to include physical copies to support writing in different areas of your classroom.

There are also some lovely resources to encourage children to think about their year in Reception and what they want to achieve in their new class.

This Looking Back, Looking Ahead Clicker Board would prompt some thoughtful discussion with your pupils. It would work nicely on your interactive whiteboard as part of a whole-class session or circle time. Children could fill it in independently, or you could print it and encourage children to write or draw their memories in.

Finally, I’m sure many of you will be off on a school trip in the summer term. The Outings section in LearningGrids is full of activities to support pupils with writing a recount of a trip!

You could also create your own Talk Set for children who will feel more confident verbally recounting their adventure.

Resource recommendations

• Summer - This collection of resources has some summer-specific activities that are fantastic for consolidating a whole range of skills.
  
  
• Clicker Friends and Planet Wobble - These Clicker Books are another brilliant reading option. They are similar to reading scheme books you’ll be using in school.
  
  
• About Me - There are some lovely activities to support children with writing about themselves, great for introducing themselves to their new teacher.

Summary

This was just a few ways you can use Clicker at different points of the school year. There are so many other resources and activities you could use. I also appreciate that every child and classroom is different, so any of these resources may be useful at different points of the year, depending on the children you’re supporting.

My number one top tip for anyone using Clicker is to spend some time looking through LearningGrids and utilise the ready-made resources. This will allow you to get a feel for the resources on offer and how you might use them throughout the year. Once you’re confident with the ready-made resources, you can use our tutorials to learn how to create your own!

I have written lots of other EYFS and Clicker-specific blog posts, check them out below:

• Using technology in your continuous provision: Clicker
  
  
• Supporting writing in Early Years
  
  
• Early reading support with Clicker

Recently, I wrote some blog posts on how you can use Clicker to support children with both early reading and early writing, which made me think about how you can use Clicker within continuous provision.

Continuous provision refers to the resources and activities provided for children to interact with daily to encourage learning through play and interaction. 

What can continuous provision look like?

Before working at Crick, I taught in EYFS across a number of different settings and introduced continuous provision in Year 1 at my last school. So I am well versed in the planning, preparation and skill required to set up valuable activities across provision! 

I would spend hours searching for inspiration (did you know we also have a Clicker Pinterest account?), making resources, and setting up my environment to create meaningful learning opportunities for my class. All whilst ensuring that these opportunities encouraged children to be independent, provided appropriate support and challenge, and they were based on our learning objectives, specific targets, as well as the children’s needs and interests. 

Once those activities were planned, I then faced the daily challenge of trying to be in 30 different places at once – scaffolding, supporting, observing, addressing misconceptions, challenging new ideas, evidencing learning… sound familiar?

The good news, is Clicker can support your continuous provision and offer pupils a wide range of activities that they can access independently.

So, how could you use Clicker within continuous provision?  

Using Clicker within continuous provision

Optimise the use of your interactive whiteboard

I have never had an early years class who didn’t love the interactive whiteboard! Whether it was for whole class teaching input, working with a small group, or putting an independent activity on during continuous provision, the children I’ve taught always engaged with the activity on-screen.

Using your interactive whiteboard is also a great way to utilise technology if you don’t have other devices available in class.

Many of Clicker’s resources are perfect for the IWB, but I always recommend Matching Sets and Sentence Sets for this purpose. They are intuitive for children to use and we have hundreds of ready-made resources on LearningGrids.

You can quickly find Matching Sets linked to a topic, text, or concept you’re exploring in class for children to access as part of their independent learning that day.  

What are Matching Sets?

Matching Sets enable pupils to match a combination of pictures, words, and sounds. If they make an incorrect choice, they’ll receive a verbal prompt to ‘try again’ until they reach success. This means they're a great activity for pupils to access without teacher support!

So, whether you’re exploring new vocabulary, consolidating maths skills, or learning new concepts – Matching Sets are an excellent resource for continuous provision! You can even create your own to tailor the activity to the needs of your children.

What are Sentence Sets?

Matching Sets aren’t the only Clicker Set that work on an IWB, you can also use Clicker’s writing grids! Sentence Sets are perfect for this as you can build a sentence by simply tapping the words on screen to add them to the document. Children can use the on-screen SoundShift tool to listen to any of the words read aloud, and they can hear their sentence read back to them by simply adding punctuation to finish their sentence and trigger the speech feedback!

Incorporate independent writing opportunities

During my teaching days, I attended many training and moderation sessions on incorporating independent writing opportunities into my early years environment. Whether this was through a dedicated mark-making area, or adding writing opportunities throughout provision, I was always searching for ways to encourage my pupils to write.

Clicker can support you with this as it provides a range of different writing grids with varying levels of scaffolding. So Clicker provides support for learners of all different abilities. Simply open a resource from LearningGrids on your device and add it to a provision area.

We have a range of writing grids on LearningGrids that would be perfect in provision – I particularly like the traditional stories resources to support with small world and role play, the maths resources, and the nursery rhyme activities.

One of the great things about Clicker resources is that they are printable. If you don’t have access to devices in your classroom you can still use these activities as a physical prompt to support your children's writing.

Top tip: print, cut and laminate Sentence Sets and Connect Sets to use as a practical sentence building activity, or simply use as a cut and stick activity - a great way to work on understanding sentence structure and vocabulary choices while developing their fine motor skills!

Encourage thought-organisation from the beginning

Another resource that particularly works as a physical prompt in provision, is a Clicker Board. Clicker Boards are an easy-to-use mind mapping tool, with lots of different purposes including planning, storyboarding, sequencing, sorting, Venn diagrams and much more! You can create your own, or print a ready-made-activity from LearningGrids. Children can then use these to collate ideas, create a plan, or gather vocabulary. Just print them out, pop them on a clipboard, and you quickly have writing enhancements for different areas in your classroom

Develop communication and language

Encouraging speaking and listening skills in an early years classroom is fundamental, but how can this be encouraged through continuous provision when you have limited adult support? I know from experience it’s impossible to capture every conversation happening in your classroom and it can feel as though you’re missing out on capturing children’s true understanding of a concept.

Clicker’s Talk Sets are amazing for gathering evidence of children’s speaking and listening skills. They allow children to explore new vocabulary, demonstrate their knowledge, and rehearse their ideas for writing.

What are Talk Sets?

Children simply need to use the sound recorder to add an audio recording alongside a picture prompt. You can then save this using your normal saving practices and have really powerful evidence to showcase a child’s understanding!

One of the things I love about Talk Sets is that you can use them for so many different areas of learning and development. I always recommend the ‘Tell the Story’ resources for gathering literacy evidence, and the wide range of maths resources available on LearningGrids.

Talk Sets for evidencing Understanding the World

I think Talk Sets are particularly powerful to use for Understanding the World, which is the area of learning I often found I had the least evidence for. As a teacher, I was confident that we were exploring this area of learning in enough detail; having conversations, going on trips, exploring texts, inviting visitors into the classroom, but I found it harder to evidence children’s understanding of these ELGs.

Using Talk Sets in provision, or as a focus activity following a teaching input or a class trip would really allow children to talk freely about what they’ve understood. They’re also great for those children who perhaps aren’t confident to share their ideas in a big group or in a conversation with an adult but still have lots to say!

Offer opportunities for independent reading

When setting up my previous classrooms, I always loved adding a linked book to my provision areas. I had baskets full of different themed books that I would bring out depending on what topics we were exploring and what the children were interested in. Having books readily available helps children to develop key skills and really develop a love of reading.

Enhance your reading provision by using Clicker Books. They are on-screen, speech supported books with built-in scaffolding. They are perfect for supporting children to access texts across the EYFS curriculum.

Whether you’re using Clicker Books on devices as a standalone resource, or alongside a physical book so children can still access the text using the built-in speech support, Clicker Books have lots of great uses within provision, and that speech support really encourages them to independently access new information and vocabulary.

Clicker Books link with writing grids, so if a child feels particularly inspired by a book, they can produce a piece of writing afterwards too!

How you can use Clicker Books in your continuous provision

You can even make your own Clicker Books using text, audio, images, and videos. Why not create a Clicker Book about a trip your class went on, or something that happened in class? In my experience, children love looking back at real-life events they were involved in, so this is a perfect activity to engage them!

This is just a small sample of the ways you could use Clicker Books; the list goes on!

Additional implementation tips

There really is so much you can do with Clicker to support your learners in continuous provision, and Clicker is very flexible depending on how your classroom is set up.

As with anything new, you’ll need to spend some time modelling Clicker to your class and giving them chances to explore it themselves before it becomes an effortless part of your continuous provision.

My number one tip would be to utilise the ready-made resources on LearningGrids, they are a great place to get started and will save you so much time! The activities are all editable, so you can quickly make changes to any resources to meet the needs of your learners.

Don’t forget, you can also print any of the activities if you don’t always have access to technology in your Early Years classroom!

Here are some other resources you may find helpful:

• Supporting writing in Early Years webinar
  
  
• Support early reading with Clicker blog post 
  
  
• Clicker and Phonics webinar 
  
  
• Book a meeting to discuss how Clicker can support your EYFS pupils

During a recent DocsPlus demonstration, someone asked me whether DocsPlus could support the school’s ‘threefold improvement plan’ by:

1. Providing access to literacy support for students across the whole school
   
   
2. Using DocsPlus as a student’s normal way of working
   
   
3. Using DocsPlus for a student’s access arrangements in exams

And the answer is, yes!

Here’s how:

Provide access to literacy support for students across the whole school

All students in secondary schools can use DocsPlus as, at its core, it is an intelligent word processor that can be of benefit to students of all abilities and ages.

Students benefit from access to DocsPlus in lessons in numerous ways, including:

• Accessing texts using the DocReader
  
  
• Planning their writing with WorkSpace
  
  
• Using Wordbars to easily include genre/topic specific vocabulary
  
  
• Accessing DocsPlus’ spell checker, speech feedback and Predictor to help construct and check their writing

Having day-to-day use of DocsPlus ensures that students are fully familiar with how the word processor and its integrated features function. By the time students require access arrangements for their formal examinations, they could have up to 3 years’ experience and expertise using DocsPlus as their normal way of working!

Use DocsPlus as students' normal way of working

To qualify for exam access arrangements, schools need ample evidence (for JCQ’s regulations) that demonstrate how the arrangements in place for the exam match how the student would normally work in the classroom.

With DocsPlus, teachers will have months’ – even years’ – worth of evidence that prove the student has completed their tasks/assignments with access to a word processor that replicates the ‘scribe’ or ‘reader’ role within an exam scenario.

DocReader

Using the DocReader, students can access texts they may have struggled to read previously. The DocReader will read the text aloud, providing them with equal access to worksheets, exam papers and more. The Dual View feature means students can access the Word Processor and the DocReader at the same time, enabling them to answer questions or create work whilst still being able to see the questions or content.

WorkSpace

Students can use a WorkSpace to organise and structure their ideas, preparing them for writing. Using this visual organising tool, students can express and arrange their ideas to help when writing coherently and with a clear theme. They can be used in lessons to prepare for essay writing or for revision preparation, including creating a revision planner to help them organise their thoughts and feel a little more in control of the situation. When students add Voice Notes to a WorkSpace, they expand on their ideas and capture their thoughts without being distracted or held back by the mechanics of writing - especially if they struggle to express themselves in written form. You can export the WorkSpace and turn it into a Wordbar!

Wordbars

Wordbars give students instant access to the specific words and phrases they need for their given topic. The different types of Wordbars can support students when using and subject-specific vocabulary and with structuring their writing. Teachers can set Wordbars across curriculum areas, which greatly benefits students who experience significant literacy barriers. They are a useful tool for revision as students could write practise answers with key vocabulary readily available. You can print them out to make them portable, and students can read the key vocabulary on their way to school in the car or on the bus!

Word Processor

At the heart of DocsPlus, is the Word Processor. With realistic speech feedback, an intelligent Predictor which suggests words based on the context and a Spell Check tool, students can make review and informed decisions, enabling them to focus on what they are trying to write and encourages them to use a wider range of vocabulary. You can toggle on and off any of these tools to ensure students' exam access arrangements and normal way of working in lessons match.

Use DocsPlus for students' access arrangements in exams

If a student qualifies for additional access arrangements in exams (access to a word processor, human reader, or human scribe), they can use DocsPlus.

The benefits for students using DocsPlus as opposed to a human scribe or reader are significant:

• Increased independence
  Using DocsPlus gives control back to the student during their exams. Because human readers are often allocated at a 1:2 ratio, students often have to wait until the reader finishes helping another student before receiving support. This can happen numerous times throughout an exam, but with DocsPlus, the power is with the student to listen to the text as frequently, and as many times, as they choose, when they choose.
  
  
• Increased confidence
  Students don’t second guess themselves when using DocsPlus. Using human scribes or readers can add an instinctive element of ‘judgement’ for the student – ‘I can’t ask them to read it again’, ‘They will know if I’m getting it wrong, so I won’t put anything’… Using DocsPlus removes this added pressure and allows students to focus entirely on answering their exam to the best of their ability.
  
  
• Increased clarity
  DocsPlus provides the opportunity for students to re-write or re-read as frequently as necessary to complete their exam to their full potential. Using a human scribe or reader can limit students’ responses as it is time-consuming to ask an ‘external resource’ to re-word or re-phrase their ideas multiple times.

More on using DocsPlus as students' normal way of working

If you would like to know more about using DocsPlus as students' normal way of working and to support students in their exams:

• Read our informative Technology in Exams Q&A.
  
  
• Visit the exam access page on our website which includes a 30-minute webinar recording on Using DocsPlus for exam access
  
  
• Book an exam support meeting with our expert team to ensure your DocsPlus setup is exam-ready.
  

For any other questions about using DocsPlus to support learning in your secondary school, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with our friendly team at info@cricksoft.com!

In meetings with customers, we are often asked if Clicker can be used to support children across the whole primary school, including writing in Early Years. My answer is always ‘yes!’

Before working at Crick, I taught across EYFS and Year 1 for 10 years, so I am always keen to use this experience to provide support and inspiration for how Clicker can be used when working with these younger pupils!  

Early Years writing sequence

Recently we ran a webinar exploring how Clicker can be used to support and engage EYFS learners based on my teaching experience.

When teaching across Nursery and Reception, I learnt that pupils need the chance to prepare and practise specific skills ahead of writing. For me, it often looked like this:

1. Pre-teaching vocabulary
2. Introducing a text
3. Retelling a story
4. Developing ideas
5. Sentence construction
6. Proof-reading

When planning a writing sequence, I was always on the lookout for resources and activities that encouraged pupil independence, high engagement and writing for purpose.

In this post, I’m going to unpick each stage of this pre-writing journey to show you how LearningGrids can provide just that for all your Early Years classroom.

Pre-teaching vocabulary 

These simple matching activities are a great way to rehearse, consolidate, and define any key words before being introduced to them in the context of the story. It also helps boost their engagement with new vocabulary.

Matching Sets work well as a whole class teaching tool on an interactive whiteboard, but they are also perfect for small group work, or for children to access independently during continuous provision.  

Introducing a text 

Retell the story 

Whether it’s in the role-play area, using stick puppets, or through a storyboard, there are so many ways to encourage children to retell a story.  

Providing them with these opportunities for repetition and reinforcement really helps them to become more confident with their knowledge of the story, in turn making them feel more confident with writing about the story.  

It’s also a great way for staff to see how much their students have understood from a text! 

Develop ideas 

You can then look at how to work together as a class to collate some ideas and key vocabulary before starting a piece of writing.  

In my teaching days, I was always big on whole-class discussions where we could produce something really visual using the children’s ideas that they could then refer to when writing.

This Jack and the Beanstalk resource includes multiple tabs, allowing you to model the activity with the children first, before they complete the second tab independently or as an adult-led activity.  

They are easily printable if you want blank copies for children to access during continuous provision too. 

Sentence construction 

After spending a sequence of lessons learning the vocabulary, exploring the text, rehearsing the story, and collating ideas…it’s time to start writing!  

This final piece of writing will likely vary depending on the different needs of children in your class.  

Clicker’s writing grids provide children with point and click access to words, phrases and pictures. There are resources available to support learners of all different abilities. So, whether they’ll be rebuilding a simple sentence, or just need a grid of vocabulary to support them with spelling and vocabulary choices – there’s a resource suitable for everyone to engage with independently.

Clicker’s built-in speech feedback allows children to listen to their completed sentences read aloud, encouraging them to use punctuation and sense-check their work before moving on.  

These resources are all editable too, so you can really tailor them to suit the needs of individual children. 

Proof-reading

Proof-reading can be a difficult skill for children to master, for many different reasons. I can think of lots of children I’ve taught who would get frustrated when trying to read back their work if they couldn’t decode their writing or found it difficult to read their handwriting due to fine motor difficulties. Using Clicker's speech feedback can reduce this frustration and allow children to take more ownership over checking their writing. 

Early Years writing genres

Providing children with plenty of valuable opportunities to write is a key element of early years teaching. Early Years children benefit from having a combination of independent, and adult-led activities to help them build on their early writing skills.

Often these activities are planned carefully, but great writing also frequently comes from the skilled EYFS staff scaffolding a writing opportunity in the moment and creating an environment that fosters a love of writing.

Ensuring that these writing opportunities are engaging for children is vital – giving them chances to enjoy a range of writing styles, genres, and purposes. Some of my go-to Early Years writing activities included:

1. Real life experiences
2. Caption writing
3. Creative writing

Real life experiences

In my experience, I often found that children were more confident when writing about their own experiences. For example, writing up their weekend news, a recount of a class trip or event, or describing a special occasion.

Clicker’s ready-made resources include a range of scaffolds to support children with writing about their weekend. With speech-supported vocabulary and prompts, children can add their ideas in independently.

Using the Voice Notes tool, children can also talk through their ideas before they start writing. This is perfect for those children who are more confident verbally, they can listen back to their recording as many times as they need throughout the writing process.

LearningGrids also has activities perfect for supporting children when writing about a class trip! In my teaching days, I took many trips to the local farm with children, and we would always do some writing when we got back to school.

The On the Farm collection in LearningGrids has a wide range of resources with different levels of support that you can use to encourage children to write about their day out.  

Caption writing

I always found value in keeping some writing tasks short and snappy in my Reception classroom. Having activities such as caption writing or labelling built into my planning really helped to develop children’s confidence with their independent writing.

Having a bank of these activities within continuous provision or set up as an independent challenge allowed them to consolidate the skills we’d been practising as a class, or in adult-led groups.

You can recreate simple caption writing in Clicker in a few different ways.  

Adding image support into a writing grid is a great way to provide scaffolding for those children who need a bit more support when writing their captions. They simply need to tap the words to bring them into the document and rebuild the sentence.

You can add your own images or pictures from the CrickPix2 library to any ready-made Clicker resources, or any activities you’re making from scratch. This is quick and easy to do, whether you’re planning ahead or adding a picture to encourage some writing in the moment!

In Clicker (Win/Mac) you can insert images into the document in several ways as a prompt for children to write their caption. This also works really nicely as a modelling activity on your interactive whiteboard, encouraging discussion about sentence structure and language choices. Any opportunity to model and reinforce the use of finger spaces and full stops in EYFS is key!

You can use Clicker Books for caption writing too! The Make-a-Book resources allow you to add your own pictures and text to every page. These resources include Clicker’s built-in support tools so children can use the Predictor, spell check, and speech support to help them build their sentence.

Creative writing

Whether children are writing their own story, retelling a story, describing a character, or producing some writing about their favourite book – creative writing always has a way of popping up in an EYFS classroom.

The repetitive language in stories can often be comforting for children when writing, helping them to find confidence with writing their own story, introducing familiar characters and settings.

Clicker has a whole creative writing section on LearningGrids, as well as resources linked to traditional tales and other stories.

These activities provide children with endless scaffolds to support them with writing!

Clicker Boards are perfect for planning a story, breaking it down into manageable steps that children can access in a way that suits their learning style best. Whether that’s single words, whole sentences, pictures, or audio. Children can access these on devices or simply print them to have a physical copy.

You can make changes to any Clicker resources to tailor them to meet the needs of your pupils. For example, quickly adding image support into a Word Bank to make it more accessible for a wider group of children.

Having a writing grid available as a prompt (either on screen or printed!) can help to fuel children’s imagination for the plot of their story. This is just a small sample of the creative writing resources available in LearningGrids.

Conclusion

Clicker is for everyone! There are so many activities to support children with meeting their early learning goals.

Clicker is such a flexible tool that you can build into your Early Years classroom in the way that suits your environment, planning, and pupil needs most effectively.

I had very limited access to technology in my previous Nursery and Reception classrooms, but the activities I’ve shown throughout this blog post can all be utilised on an interactive whiteboard or printed to use as a physical activity.

This is just a small sample of ways that Clicker can be used in an EYFS classroom. Here are some other resources you might find helpful:

• Supporting writing in Early Years webinar
• Support early reading with Clicker blog post 
• Clicker and Phonics webinar 

Introduction

Recently, more schools have requested online training for using Clicker with younger learners, especially emergent readers and early reading.  

As a former EYFS and KS1 teacher, I use my experience in these sessions to showcase how many of Clicker’s key features are beneficial for these pupils.

Here are the four key elements of teaching early reading that I would focus on supporting with Clicker: 

1. Exploring vocabulary 
2. Decoding
3. Using expression 
4. Comprehension and understanding

Exploring vocabulary with early readers

Matching Sets

I am a huge advocate of using Matching Sets to support with those vital early reading skills. They are a flexible resource and intuitive for children to use independently. They also make a great teaching tool on your interactive whiteboard! Matching Sets enable children to match words, pictures, and sounds to rehearse and consolidate new vocabulary. 

I would often pre-teach vocabulary ahead of a new topic or text, and Matching Sets are a brilliant way to do this. In my experience, letting children explore new words and connect them to their sounds and images helps them read more confidently on their own. 

Teaching vocabulary is crucial for early reading, so LearningGrids offers numerous ready-made Matching Sets on various topics.

Decoding resources for early reading

Having taught younger learners, I know how important phonics activities are to help pupils build confidence decoding new words.

Our fantastic phonics resources on LearningGrids are easy to build into your planning to support your phonics teaching.

The stories and activities are presented within cumulative letter groups. This means that children can work at appropriate levels and progress through the groups as their confidence with an increasing range of phonemes and graphemes grows. It also means that children can move incrementally from simple to more complex phonic work, and teachers can introduce the phonemes in discrete daily phonics sessions.

These letter groups are organised as follows:

1. s, a, t, p, i, n
   
   
2. c/k, e, h, r, m, d (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)
   
   
3. g, o, u, l, f, b (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)
   
   
4. ai, j, or, oa, ie, ee (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)
   
   
5. z, w, v, ng, long/short oo (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)
   
   
6. y, x, ch, sh, hard/soft th (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)
   
   
7. qu, ou, oi, ue, er, ar, ear, air (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

Clicker Books

As reading is vital for children to fully access the curriculum, making sure early learners are secure in their knowledge of phonics is one of the key priority areas. Reading books that are decodable for a child and pitched at their stage of learning is important for building confidence.

Use the Read a Book version of the stories for added speech support. The Read It Yourself version is designed to encourage children to have a go at decoding and reading the text for themselves, so it’s ideal when children are feeling more confident with the phonemes and graphemes at their level.

Clicker’s decodable stories are written with phonetically decodable text and common exception words, helping children to build key early reading skills. They are perfect for 1:1 reading sessions, but they also work as a group read, or as a whole class activity.

Matching Sets

Another way I always recommend using Matching Sets is to support your phonics teaching. 

In my teaching days, I loved simple phonics activities and games that my class could access independently. Matching Sets are an excellent resource for children developing blending, segmenting, and grapheme-phoneme correspondence skills. They are a valuable tool for supporting early reading to help children develop their decoding skills and ability to sound out words.

Using expression as early readers

From my experience teaching Year 1, I know that teaching expression and intonation in reading can be challenging. Though children are learning many new skills, developing expression is key to building comprehension and a love of reading.  

Adding our audio notes tool into a Clicker Book is a great way to support children with this. 

Clicker Books

You can edit Clicker Books to include an audio recording of children reading the text aloud. They can listen back to this to: 

• Hear the story read in their own words 
• Listen out for how they’ve used expression 
• Check if they’ve paid attention to punctuation 
• See if their sentences make sense 

You could also record adults reading the text aloud using these audio notes and ask the children to play teacher! If an adult purposely reads with little expression or poor punctuation, children can listen for ways to improve and give feedback. A simple but effective way for children to be demonstrating their understanding of these skills, without even realising! 

Early reading comprehension and understanding

It’s great when a child can read a word, a full sentence, or even a whole book – but how can we ensure they’ve actually understood what they’ve read?

Comprehension skills are a vital part of early reading, and Clicker has a few ways to help!

Reading into writing

One of the things I love about using Clicker Books from LearningGrids is the corresponding writing activities. Writing grids vary in scaffolding and help children write about the book they’ve read. This is perfect for helping them to consolidate the text and show their understanding.  

Speaking and listening

Talk Sets are another fantastic way to gauge a child’s understanding of a text. They allow children to verbally share what they’ve read and are especially useful for children who struggle to express themselves in written form. They can record their thoughts about different parts of the text, describe characters or settings, retell a story, and so much more! 

Conclusion

Clicker offers a wide range of resources that can support early reading skills, from pre-reading skills such as exploring new vocabulary, to post-reading comprehension activities.

By incorporating Clicker’s interactive activities into your lessons, children are provided with valuable opportunities to practise and consolidate a range of key reading skills, allowing them to gain confidence in accessing content across the curriculum.

This is just a small snippet of how Clicker can help with early reading skills. Here are some other resources you might find helpful: 

• Clicker and Phonics webinar
  
  
• Supporting writing in Early Years webinar
  
  
• Clicker for whole class teaching blog post

We spoke with Sophie, a Year 1 teacher who was using Clicker to support her pupils with non-fiction writing. Sophie showed us how she used Clicker’s ready-made writing grids to help her class with instruction writing. Sophie was amazed by how Clicker supported low attainers in her class whilst extending high attainers and allowed all her pupils to be more independent with their non-fiction writing. Check out this success story to read about the instruction writing her class produced! 

LearningGrids has a range of resources available to support students with a variety of non-fiction writing. Let’s explore how we could use these ready-made resources to plan a sequence of lessons linked to a recount learning objective. 

First, this Recount Planner is a brilliant resource for preparing and planning a piece of recount writing. Students can add in key information to create a plan, and then refer to it when writing their final piece. This is a flexible resource and could be used as a whole class planning tool by displaying the Board on your interactive whiteboard, or children could access it in groups or individually. From my teaching experience, I know having a good plan really influences the quality of a final piece of writing! 

Next, this Connect Set is great for developing writers, and allows them to take steps towards creating a piece of non-fiction writing independently. This writing grid offers useful vocabulary and phrases to help children to organise their writing and includes time connectives to support pupils with creating a cohesive recount. When the sentence is finished with a full stop, Clicker will read the sentence back - this is a great tool for encouraging children to proofread their own work. Sophie noted that, with this speech feedback, her students were picking up on errors they would not have ordinarily recognised! 

Finally, for your more independent writers, this Word Bank contains starters and useful vocabulary to support your students with writing a simple recount. They can click or tap the words to add them to the Document and use Clicker’s built-in speech support to hear any of the words or phrases read aloud. Sophie commented that having these banks of vocabulary and visual prompts really encouraged her Year 1 pupils to extend their writing! 

This is just a sample of the non-fiction resources available; you can find a range of different Clicker Sets to support your pupils on LearningGrids. There are resources to support with letter writing, advertisements, discussion planners and more!

I recently ran a webinar on using Clicker as part of your whole class teaching. Clicker is an invaluable support tool, but we recognise that not all schools have the licenses or devices for every pupil to access Clicker in every lesson. 

As a former teacher, I know that it can be tricky to use technology in your lessons in the way you would like to. In the school I taught in most recently, we shared 15 iPads across a year group of 90 children, so it was always a case of checking the iPads were available, going on a hunt to find the iPad trolley, and check all the iPads were fully charged before we could think about using them. 

So, I wanted to explore the ways that you can still get the most out of your Clicker subscription by using it as a teaching tool on your interactive whiteboard. 

Introducing topics

We started by looking at how you can use Clicker Books to introduce new topics to the class. Clicker Books are on-screen, speech supported books which are perfect for using across a range of curriculum areas. 

During the webinar we focused on the ready-made activities from LearningGrids and used the Savannah Animals resources as an example. In my experience, using a book as a hook into a new theme or topic is always an effective way to gather valuable information on what the children already know, explore what they would like to find out, and begin introducing new concepts and vocabulary. 

We looked at how the Read a Book style of Clicker Book are full of text and pictures and are ideal to display on your interactive whiteboard for whole class teaching. We also explored how the Read It Yourself books work perfectly as a follow up activity, or for your more emergent readers. 

One of the lovely things about Clicker Books is that they come with other linked Clicker Sets that are fantastic for using as a follow up activity, allowing you to keep consistency with the vocabulary and images explored in the book. 

For example, as a whole class follow up to the Animals of the Savannah book, we looked at how you might use the linked Matching Set as a fun consolidation activity in a later lesson. Matching Sets are great for work on vocabulary and perfect for using on your interactive whiteboard! We talked about ways you might use this in your lesson, for example as a starter or plenary, as a group quiz, with students writing answers on whiteboards – they are a really flexible resource you can build into your lesson planning in a way that suits the needs of your learners!

There are a variety of Matching Sets across a range of topics available on LearningGrids, including Maths and Phonics,  which are easy to build into your teaching inputs using your interactive whiteboard.

Alternatively, Clicker Sets are printable so you could choose to print a physical copy of these for students to access as a matching activity within a lesson or laminate them so you can use them multiple times!

Gathering ideas for writing

Next, we looked at how you can use Clicker Boards to collate pupils’ ideas and thoughts ahead of a piece of writing. Clicker Boards are an easy-to-use mind mapping tool, they are a versatile tool so we explored just a few of the ways you might use them in class. 

The Writing Frames and Planners section in LearningGrids is brilliant for a range of cross-curricular writing. These boards allow you to produce a plan together as a class that can be used to model a piece of writing, enabling you to have lots of effective discussion ahead of pupils tackling the writing process independently.

There are a range of non-fiction planners available, too, including recounts, discussions, advertisements, and more. 

Then, we delved into how you can gather ideas and vocabulary for a piece of creative writing. We used the story planner Clicker Board to look at how you can collate a range of vocabulary and customise the appearance of your board, so it suits the needs of your learners. With a Clicker Board displayed on your interactive whiteboard, children can offer their ideas whilst you quickly type them in and build up your mind map. 

I was forever creating mind maps when I was teaching, but these would often end up as frantically scrawled diagrams on a piece of flipchart paper, that would end up stuck on a cupboard door. With Clicker Boards, you can tailor the appearance and quickly add in picture support too, great for printing out for a working wall or to stick in children’s books!

Modelled writing

One of my favourite features of Clicker Boards is that they can quickly and easily be turned into a Word Bank, allowing you to transition seamlessly from the planning process to the writing process. With the Word Bank displayed on your interactive whiteboard, you can use Clicker’s word processor to model the writing process whilst having quick access to all the key vocabulary needed for your piece of writing. This is a fantastic way for you to talk about sentence structure, language choices, and punctuation before the children begin their own writing. 

Then, depending on what technology you have available during that lesson some students may go on to produce a piece of writing using Clicker on a device, some may be independently writing in their books, or some may be using a printed Word Bank to support them with spelling and vocabulary in their writing. 

This is just a few examples of how you might use Clicker as part of your whole class teaching! If you would like more information, you can:

• View the recording from this webinar
• Visit our training hub
• Book a meeting
• Explore LearningGrids for resources relevant to your learners

We have recently added to our DocsPlus training resources, which now include tutorials on saving, sharing and printing documents and Smart Tabs. 

We know that these are fundamental in using the software successfully – for both your staff and students – so these tutorials cover all devices (PC, Chromebooks and iPads) and are broken down into simple steps for everyone to follow.  

If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can use the menu to the right of the screen to jump to the tutorial you need. Otherwise, you can watch the tutorials through in full for a start-to-finish guide on saving, sharing and printing in DocsPlus (Windows/Mac, iPad, Chromebook). 

If you need any extra help at any point, our support team is always happy to help. You can reach us by email at support@cricksoft.com, by phone at 01604 671691 or by completing this short form.

Recently, we spoke with a school who have successfully used Clicker to transform a student’s negative relationship with writing and improved their outlook and pride in their written work.

This student particularly benefited from using tailor made Word Banks, filled with targeted vocabulary to support her writing. The staff decided to create Word Banks for this learner with some sentence starters, and adjective and verb suggestions to help her structure a cohesive piece of writing. The Word Bank also included the student’s target spelling words so she could access them independently in the lesson, using Clicker’s speech feedback to hear them read aloud.

Watch the video below to find out how you can create your own personalised Word Banks to support your learners.

Read the Magill School success story to find out more about how they use Clicker to support their students.

Watch our tutorials to learn how to create and edit more Clicker resources.

Recently, we spoke with a teacher who said that one of their favourite features of Clicker is that you can quickly turn a Clicker Board into a Word Bank!

Pupils can contribute their ideas to a whole-class discussion on a topic, and the teacher can collate the ideas using Clicker Board on the whiteboard. The Board can then be turned into a Word Bank and shared with students to use to support their independent writing.

This allows pupils to transition seamlessly from planning a piece of writing to producing their writing using a wide range of vocabulary.

With this vocabulary available in a Word Bank, learners can easily add words to a piece of writing and use Clicker’s built-in speech support to hear any words read aloud. They will also have access to all of Clicker’s support tools throughout their writing.

Clicker is a flexible tool, so you can create mind maps related to anything that suits the needs of your learners. For example, you may wish to collate sentence starters, character descriptions, or key vocabulary linked to a topic you are studying in class.

Watch our video to find out how you can turn your Clicker Board into a Word Bank!

There are hundreds of ready-made Clicker Boards available on LearningGrids, or you can create your own!

Picture the scene: It’s 1.45pm and your Year 1 class have just listened eagerly to a Science lesson all about the five senses, you’ve kept them captivated and are just setting them off to do some independent writing. Suddenly it’s 2pm, six children still haven’t found a pencil, four children have skipped three pages in their exercise book and a large percentage of your class have written a sentence that looks nothing like the work they produced in Literacy that morning. Before you know it, it’s 2.15pm and the children are rushing out to play with half a sentence written on the wrong page in their book...

So, my question is, how can Clicker help some of our youngest writers to accurately portray their understanding in our foundation subjects? When I was teaching, I found that my Year 1’s Science and Topic books were rarely a true representation of what they had learnt and understood throughout the lesson, and I was always searching for ways to increase engagement and evidence new learning in my classroom.

This is how I would use Clicker’s wide range of tools to ensure my whole class were showing off their new-found knowledge in foundation subjects. I am going to explore the Our Senses LearningGrids resources - ready-made resources that you can quickly and easily customise to suit the needs of your learners. This suggested sequence of activities can be used at the pace that suits your learners (and over a number of lessons depending on your timetable!)

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Complete a pre-teach to check the children’s prior learning using a Clicker Board

The beauty of Clicker is that you can adapt it to suit the needs of your class. Your Planning Board can be used with a whole class, in groups or individually. This pre-teach activity will give you a great insight into what your children already know. Why not repeat this activity at the end of the unit as a post-teach activity to see how far they’ve come?

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Read a Clicker Book

Once I’d explored what my children already know, I would use a Clicker Book about the senses to support my teaching. This could be done as a whole class during your teaching input, or more independently as part of a guiding reading session. You can choose for the children to read the book themselves or listen to the text read aloud.

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Check children’s understanding through Matching Sets

Time to let the children show off what they are learning! With this Matching Set children can show their understanding of the five senses whilst also having some fun. They listen to statements about sense organs and choose the picture that best fits the information. On each page, children need to simply click on the speaker button to listen and then choose the matching picture.

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Oral recording of their new knowledge using Talk Sets

Next, I’d get the children talking about what they have learnt. In this Talk About activity, children record information about the five senses. There are Talk Sets linked to each of the senses, you could split your class into five groups and have each group plan out and record ideas for a different sense. You could then have a listening party where you share and celebrate each other’s work.

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Write simple sentences using a Connect Set

After the children had orally rehearsed their ideas in the previous lesson, I would set them the task of using a Connect Set to write simple sentences about each of the five senses by matching sentence beginning and endings. This is a great way for the children to practise sentences about what they have learnt before moving on to the grand finale…

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…Make a book!

Now your children are experts on all things senses, they could make their own Clicker Book. This resource includes word and picture banks to support the children in being as independent as possible. This is something the children could do individually, in pairs or in groups. The children will love being a non-fiction author, and you can quickly see who has grasped the new learning and find out where any gaps in learning are.

So now, it’s the end of your senses topic and your class are proudly reading each other their Clicker Books, full of knowledge and relevant vocabulary. All children have been able to access the activities, and without a single child looking for a pencil!

The features I’ve mentioned here are just a small sample of the many easy-to-use tools and resources available on LearningGrids to support children with their cross-curricular writing.

We’re excited to share that our new training resources - tutorials on saving, sharing, and printing Clicker files – are now live on our website!

These tutorials are full of useful information to support you with saving, sharing, and printing on all devices - PC, Chromebooks, and iPads. 

You can either watch a full tutorial, or quickly jump to the information that you need using the menu to the right of the screen. Each video comes with a handy printable summary so you can print the step-by-step instructions and keep them to hand.

These tutorials are great for showing you how you can use your school’s normal saving, sharing and printing practices with Clicker files!

Saving

These tutorials guide you through how to save Clicker Documents and Clicker Sets on different devices and to different locations. Find out how to save your Clicker files in line with your school’s established saving systems.

There’s also a ‘top tips’ section where we delve into how to navigate and customise your file explorer, and how to save your Clicker files as an alternative file type. For example, saving your work as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF so that you can open it on a device that doesn’t have Clicker installed.

Sharing

We understand how important it is to be able to share files quickly and easily, from sharing files with colleagues, sharing a resource to a different device, or sharing work with parents and carers. We also understand that the number of ways you can share files can be overwhelming, particularly if it involves devices from other platforms!

So, the new tutorials guide you through different ways to share your Clicker files, providing clear explanations of which file sharing methods are available on your device, and the steps required to utilise them. Learn about how to share Clicker files, and how to open Clicker files that have been shared with you.

The tutorials include useful information on sharing Clicker files via email, cloud storage, network sharing, and sharing through AirDrop, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.

Printing

Whether you’re printing work to keep a physical record of learners’ progress or printing Clicker Sets to share with students and staff – these tutorials will have the information you need! They include extra information on how to add headers and footers, how to save on ink by turning off backgrounds, and how to print your Analytics information.

Our Support team is always happy to help if you have any technical questions or difficulties getting set up with our software. You can reach us by email at support@cricksoft.com, by phone at 01604 671691 or by completing this short form.

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Recently we spoke with staff at St Catherine’s Academy to find out how they are using Clicker as a school-wide approach to learning support.

They are successfully using Clicker in a number of different ways, but I was particularly interested in how the KS2 team use Clicker to consolidate word classifications. Staff take Word Banks and colour code them to match the school’s system. For example, creating a Word Bank with a purple tab for adjectives, a green tab for nouns and an orange tab for verbs. 

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Recently, we have been speaking with schools to find out how they are using Clicker in a school-wide approach to learning support.

One school explained that they use Clicker in upper elementary classrooms to consolidate word classifications. Educators take Word Banks and color code them to match the school’s system. For example, creating a Word Bank with a yellow tab for nouns, a blue tab for verbs and an orange tab for adjectives.

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There are hundreds of ready-made Word Banks available on LearningGrids, linked to a wide range of curriculum areas, and it is quick and easy to edit them to add your own colour coding! In edit view, you can change the colour of your grids or individual words by clicking or tapping the colour palette.

Clicker is a flexible tool that allows you to add or remove this type of scaffolding depending on the needs of your learners. You can quickly remove this colour coding for your older learners, so you can identify how well the children’s understanding of word classification has progressed.

Watch our tutorial to find out how to edit a Word Bank from LearningGrids, or how to quickly create your own from scratch!

For information on how to use Clicker to support Colourful Semantics, watch our on-demand webinar or check out the resources on LearningGrids!

Recently, we ran a training webinar focusing on how Clicker can be used in the Early Years.

We had lots of interest in different literacy topics, including vocabulary building activities, speaking and listening activities, and sentence building. As a former EYFS teacher, it was great to see how many resources there are available within LearningGrids that can be used in an Early Years setting! We explored Little Red Riding Hood as an example, but there are thousands more ready-made resources, linked to many other stories, themes and topics.

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Vocabulary building

For vocabulary building, we started by looking at the Look and Read Matching Set. This resource is a great way to introduce learners to the key language they are likely to encounter in the story. Children can rehearse vocabulary by matching an image from the story to the corresponding word. This is a brilliant activity for children to complete independently after a teaching input, it’s such an engaging way for them to consolidate new learning!

Next, we looked at Clicker Books. These on-screen, speech supported books empower pupils of all abilities to read more independently. We began by exploring the Little Red Riding Hood Read a Book, which provides a more detailed version of the story combining images and text to engage your learners. To make this activity more accessible, children also have the option to hear the story read aloud.

We then looked at the Read it Yourself book. These books are designed for children to read the text themselves, using a simplified version of the story to encourage independence when reading. For additional support, this resource can be edited to include a read button so children can use Clicker to read the story to them. I always enjoyed nurturing a love of reading in my classroom, and Clicker Books are a great way of encouraging this! They make reading fun for your learners and allow them to access a range of books independently.

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Speaking and listening

Next, we looked at how Clicker can be used to develop speaking and listening skills. We began by looking at the Little Red Riding Hood Keywords activity. Children can listen to core vocabulary from the story and record themselves saying these words aloud.

Once learners are familiar with the key vocabulary and plot of the story, they can use this Tell the Story Talk Set to orally retell Little Red Riding Hood. This resource includes images from the story in sequence, learners simply click a picture and record their ideas using the microphone button.  When finished, children can listen to all the recordings to hear the story retold in their own words. This resource can be completed individually, in groups, or as a whole class!

Finally, we explored Clicker Boards. With this Describe the Characters activity, children can create profile mind maps of characters from the story. Children can type key descriptive words into text boxes and further expand on their ideas by recording a voice note. I would have enjoyed using this as a whole class activity with my Reception class, the children can contribute ideas whilst the teacher collates them on the whiteboard. This board can then be turned into a word bank to support learners further with their writing!

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Sentence Building

For sentence building skills, we began by looking at the Clicker Sets available to support children of all writing abilities. First, we looked at this Sentence Set, which helps children to build a simple sentence word by word. This resource provides children with all the words needed to build their first sentence, with the words displayed in a random order. Learners click each word to bring it into the document and build their sentence whilst developing their understanding of sentence structure and word order.

If children come to a word or phrase they cannot decode, they can use the speech feedback to hear it read aloud. Once the sentence is finished and a period is added in, Clicker reads the sentence back to the children so they can listen out for any errors. For additional support when using the Sentence Set, children can look at the complete sentence to understand the correct sentence structure before having another go.

Next we explored a Connect Set to support children with retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood. This resource provides children with a scaffold to support the writing process and encourages them to independently experiment with a wider choice of vocabulary and sentence structures. This activity contains images from the story, so learners can choose when and how they want to illustrate their writing.

It was fantastic to be able to share these ideas with so many of our customers. If you’d like more information on how you can use Clicker to support your learners in Early Years, you can:

• Watch our tutorials or book a meeting.
  
  
• Explore LearningGrids for resources on nursery rhymes, sentence patterns, positional language and thousands more!