After their training session, a school reached out for further support on how to guide their pupils through Clicker’s writing grids to encourage independent writing.  

Writing grids are resources available in Clicker that have been designed to provide writing-specific support for learners of all abilities.  

The school could clearly see what a fantastic tool Clicker is, so their teachers wanted more guidance on how to use the different types of writing grids to help pupils progress from emergent and developing writers into independent writers. 

They had the initial idea of a flow chart concept which could be used by staff to understand how to move pupils through the writing grids, clearly demonstrating how learners can progress through various stages of scaffolding. Using this idea, I created a flow chart that guides teachers through which writing grid to use and when. 

1. Sentence Sets are simple sentence building activities, working on building a specific sentence word by word. Sentence Sets are perfect for pupils who needs support writing simple sentences with correct word order and sense. 

2. The pupil may then move onto Connect Sets which are going to support your developing writers, providing clusters of words to help them build a coherent piece of text. It is still scaffolded writing but gives a greater choice of words.  

3. Finally, Word Banks are for more independent writers who can form sentences but need vocabulary support. Word Banks give pupils access to correctly spelt subject specific vocabulary and provide support when using new vocabulary or difficult words. Word Banks can be organised into topic tabs to help structure a piece of writing or arranged alphabetically to support spelling.   

To use the flow chart in your school, download it here.  

Clicker’s intuitive word processor, including spell checker, Predictor, and Voice Notes can be used alongside Clicker’s writing grids to transform a pupil’s daily writing challenges into achievable targets.  

To view our bank of ready-made writing grids, visit LearningGrids. If you would like to edit or create your own writing grids, watch our tutorials.  

If you have any questions, you can book a meeting with your Clicker Partnership Consultant.