Supporting writing in Early Years
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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:
- Pre-teaching vocabulary
- Introducing a text
- Retelling a story
- Developing ideas
- Sentence construction
- 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
You can begin the writing journey with Matching Sets to familiarise children with key vocabulary they’re likely to encounter when being introduced to a new text or topic.
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
Next, Clicker Books are a fantastic learning resource for the Early Years classroom. When I was teaching, I always loved using a book as a hook! In my experience, young learners love books, so using a Clicker Book is a great way to listen to the new vocabulary in context and with visual reinforcement. This helps build the connection between how words look and sound (otherwise known as linguistic iconicity for those of you who love a technical term!)
You can display the books on your whiteboard as part of a teaching input, or they work brilliantly on individual devices in small groups or 1:1 with individual children.
Clicker Books come at varying levels of difficulty depending on the needs of your pupils and include built in speech feedback (text-to-speech support) so pupils can listen to the text read aloud.
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.
Clicker’s Tell the Story Talk Sets are a great alternative way to allow children to retell a story. Using the sound recorder, they can add an audio recording alongside the images in the story. This is a perfect opportunity for students to practise using all the new vocabulary in context and listen back to the story being told in their own words.
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 is where Clicker Board comes in! Clicker Board provides you with a flexible mind mapping tool where you can collate all those great ideas, and even add image support for your more visual learners.
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:
- Real life experiences
- Caption writing
- 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
