Bridging the gap between Reception and Year 1 is an ongoing challenge in many schools. Transitioning from the ethos and learning style of a Reception classroom into the curriculum demands of Year 1, without putting too much pressure on the children, can be difficult.

The EYFS - Y1 transition period can take time and patience (from both Reception staff and Y1 staff!) and how you approach this transition will vary depending on the needs of your children and the routines of your classrooms. Whether you have continuous provision embedded across both EYFS and Y1, or a more formal learning structure – moving year groups can be daunting for your pupils!

To help ease the transition, I have put together the tips below to share some of the ways that Clicker and the ever-expanding bank of resources on LearningGrids can be used to help pupils adjust to their new school life.

Reduce pupil anxiety by helping them to picture the classroom

One of the reasons that the transition can be unsettling for pupils is that they don’t know what to expect.

A simple way to help this is to give pupils activities that help them imagine a typical day in class.

The Pam’s School – Read a Book is an excellent place to start. In this Clicker Book, pupils can read simple sentences about a girl called Pam and her school, supported by matching images. This resource is a great base to create an age-appropriate visual guide for pupils on what to look out for at their school.

To make the resource your own:

• First swap out the existing images for photos of key areas and staff in your school.
  
  
• Then edit the text to help your pupils learn any names of people, objects and places they will need.

(Top tip: Make sure staff names or school-specific terminology are read back to your pupils correctly - add the correct pronunciation and spelling to the Word Pool.)

Collaborate with former Year 1s

New pupils will have lots of questions about what to expect from their Year 1 journey. So who better to answer them than those who have already gone through it?

Create interactive activities to share between the year groups. I would recommend using either a Talk Set or a Clicker Board with added Voice Notes.

Your new Year 1s can brainstorm all the questions they have into a Talk Set or Clicker Board. Then, pass this over to the former Year 1 class to record their answers.

This helps ease new pupils’ worries and is a good way to review the previous Year 1's learning and check how well they understood it.

Adapt for EAL pupils

For EAL pupils, and particularly new arrivals, the new year comes with the added challenge of learning a lot of new vocabulary. To help, there are a number of school-specific activities in the New To English section of LearningGrids. You can learn more about using Clicker to support EAL pupils by reading EAL learning support with Clicker.

Use visual timetables to help pupils adjust to their new routine

The new routine will probably be the biggest adjustment for your Year 1s.

At the start of the school year, they will have just come back from six weeks of holiday, and for many children their last experience of school would have followed a free form learning through play approach that allowed them to explore and discover at their own pace. Now there might be the expectation that they have to sit down for longer periods in more formally-structured lessons.

Regardless of what your daily routine looks like, visual timetables are a great tool. They help pupils remember routines and remove the stress of not knowing what comes next (and reduce the number of times you have to explain that it’s not lunchtime yet!)

To start making visual timetables for your class, search for 'visual timetable' on LearningGrids and select the option that works best for your classroom needs, including:

• The Now and Next – Make a Book: You can use this to create a simple timetable for the whole day. Pupils can have it on hand and independently flip through to the portion of the day they’re curious about.
  
  
• The Visual Schedule: This can be used to display all the activities on one page, or even just the current and next activity if you find that your pupils get distracted by thinking too far ahead.
  
  
• The Now, Next, Then Connect Set: This lets pupils practise forming sentences with the key words and phrases from the timetable. So it helps to embed the routine in their memory whilst giving them an opportunity to practise early sentence structure.
  
  

Start building independence

Getting your new Year 1s to attempt their tasks independently can be a challenge. Many young children seek adult reassurance for anything they find tricky as the idea of working things out for themselves is peculiar and new.

The Stuck List  is a great resource to remind your pupils to try their work before asking for help. You can fill in the spaces ahead of time so pupils can have the list on hand as an easy reference or use it as the starting point for an activity where the class comes together to brainstorm things they can do before raising their hand.   

Add prompts such as ‘check the board’ or ‘read the task’ to remind pupils to refer to instructions, ‘ask your friends’ to encourage knowledge sharing between peers, or 'try even if you're not sure' to reassure them that being stuck is a normal part of learning. 

Keep track of how your pupils are handling the changes

The well-being of your pupils is just as important as their academic success, and they will be feeling all sorts of new emotions as they transition into a new classroom/year group. Setting aside some time to allow your pupils to work through these feelings will play a big role in how they experience their new normal. Resources like the Daily Feelings Connect Set allow pupils to clearly communicate their feelings with the help of easy-to-understand visual prompts.

You can assign the Daily Feelings set - or any other suitable resource from the Feelings and Action section of LearningGrids - as often as needed. This helps you monitor how your class is coping with the transition into the next phase of learning. It also makes it easier to spot pupils who might need extra support.

Find out more about how Clicker can be used to support young learners

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

And for helpful advice on how to customise LearningGrids resources for your class visit Clicker tutorials - step-by-step videos for Clicker users.