Educators everywhere are facing the same dilemma:

How do we give every student what they need, when the range of skills in a single classroom feels impossibly wide?

In Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), Tier 1 is designed to serve all students with high-quality, inclusive instruction. When that foundation isn’t solid, everything built on top begins to wobble.

As Dr. Katie Novak, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) expert and author, explains:

“UDL has to be the foundation of a multi-tiered system. It has to be first, best instruction with all students present, and if it’s not, we’re going to be trying to intervention our way out of weak Tier 1. Which is never going to work.”

Clicker is a UDL tool. It helps schools strengthen that “first, best instruction” through Tier 1, and it continues to provide meaningful, scaffolded supports as students move into Tier 2 and Tier 3. Strong intervention is a continuation of strong core instruction.

The real-world tension between idea and possibility

Clicker in small groups: Supporting MTSS without the overwhelm

Theories and frameworks have always been at odds with classroom realities. Educators are told to support students by differentiating. However, the logistics, especially in early literacy, can feel impossible.

You (or your teachers) are juggling wide skill gaps, limited planning time, and curriculum pacing guides that don’t slow down just because your students need more support.

One student is still working on letter sounds. Another is already reading paragraphs. A third needs every word read aloud. And somehow, the expectation is to meet all of those needs simultaneously, without extra hands, time, or tools that make it manageable.

Best practices like differentiation don’t need to be an illusion. Clicker can be used to help students build sentences, engage with phonics-aligned texts, and practice writing in a way that feels accessible and empowering. The tools support their motor needs and their literacy development, without requiring teachers to create an entirely separate curriculum.

It’s a clear example of how MTSS doesn’t need to be work with additional, separate resources. When the right tools are already in place, it simply means better support, which is exactly what the MTSS framework calls for.

MTSS is not a program - it’s a practical way to give kids what they need

If you’ve ever sat in a team meeting wondering what to do next for a student who isn’t making progress, you’ve already felt the need for a better system.

MTSS is that system; it’s a way of organizing how we support students based on real-time data, collaborative decision-making, and instruction that meets student needs. As Dr. Stephanie Stollar put it,

“MTSS is the delivery mechanism for the reading research.”

At its core, MTSS is evidence-based instruction and equity. Most of the time, we look at skill gaps and try to remediate those deficiencies, but as Dr. Sarah Brown explained:

“MTSS is more than just identifying who needs help and giving it.”

Instead, MTSS offers a system-level approach that asks:

• What’s working in Tier 1 instruction?
  
  
• Who needs something more?
  
  
• And how can we deliver that support in a way that’s strategic, sustainable, and helpful?

Here’s a quick overview of what that looks like in practice:

• Tier 1: Core instruction for all students. This is your main block of classroom teaching, ideally high-quality, universally designed, and accessible to the full range of learners.
  
  
• Tier 2: Targeted small-group intervention. For students who need a bit more practice or support in specific areas, delivered a few times per week.
  
  
• Tier 3: Intensive, individualized intervention. For students with more significant needs who benefit from additional targeted intervention.

Clicker supports all three tiers, but the most important takeaway here is not that you or your teachers need more tools. You already have plenty at your disposal. Adding more makes for more complexity, and that’s not the goal. The goal of MTSS is to simplify support. And that starts by using the right tools in smarter, more strategic ways.

Supporting students across the 3 tiers of MTSS

One of Clicker’s strengths is its flexibility. It’s not the star of the show; students are. It’s why Clicker doesn’t have to be reserved for one setting, one student group, or one support tier. In many districts, Clicker is used as whole-class support. And, in others, Clicker is a Tier 2 and Tier 3 support.

Here’s how Clicker aligns with the MTSS framework across all three tiers:

Tier 1: Universal instruction

Clicker strengthens Tier 1 by making core instruction more accessible for every student. Its built-in supports - like word prediction, speech feedback, and customizable writing grids - provide scaffolded supports during whole group instruction, and allows all students to participate meaningfully in grade-level instruction.

For example, teachers can use Clicker’s Sentence Sets and writing grids during whole-group phonics or comprehension lessons. These tools offer just enough structure to support struggling writers while still allowing independence and creativity.

This is what MTSS at Tier 1 is really about. It’s not “everyone gets the same.” It’s “everyone gets what they need in a shared learning space.”

Tier 2: Targeted intervention

Imagine this scene: a second-grade classroom where most students are progressing academically, but a few students still struggle with basic CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) blending. The teacher has been covering more advanced vowel teams in whole-group phonics lessons because that’s what the pacing guide says.

Rather than rushing ahead, the teacher pivots. During Tier 2 small-group time, they use Clicker to target exactly what these students need: custom Word Banks for CVC practice, decodable texts, and short writing prompts that reinforce exactly those sounds.

Tier 3: Intensive intervention

When a student needs additional time for targeted intervention, Clicker meets the need. Educators can adapt Sentence Sets, sentence frames, add Voice Notes, simplify vocabulary, or build custom writing tasks that align with student needs.

Clicker allows educators to document, respond to, and build upon what students can do, right now, in real instructional time.

Data-informed, team-led instruction (not tracking)

MTSS uses multiple data points to help inform student academic deficiencies. Targeted intervention groups are then created based on the need to support academic progression within those identified deficiencies.

Groupings in an MTSS framework are meant to respond to current needs. As new data comes in, groups adjust. And when those groupings are driven by a collaborative team, not a single teacher working in isolation, they become a tool for equity, not exclusion.

Clicker makes it easier to act on those decisions. You can co-create writing supports, share templates across classrooms, and build continuity between classroom instruction and intervention services.

Final thought: MTSS only works when we use what we already have well

At the end of the day, you don’t need 27 new tools or to overhaul a curriculum to provide tiered support. All you need is a system that helps you make the most of the resources already at your fingertips. And a way of seeing frameworks for what they are: guidance to support decision-making.

Clicker bridges the gap between whole-group instruction and individualized supports. Between what your teachers are already doing, and what your students actually need. Between big-picture frameworks like MTSS, and the day-to-day work of small group lessons, targeted scaffolds, and differentiated writing tasks.

Across tiers, across classrooms, and across time, Clicker helps make MTSS real, practical, and sustainable.

Providing students with plenty of valuable opportunities to write is a key element of early elementary teaching. Younger students 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 skilled educators 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 students is vital – giving them chances to enjoy a range of writing styles, genres, and purposes. Some of my go-to early writing activities included:

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

Real life experiences

In my classroom, I often found that students 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 students with writing about their weekend. With speech-supported vocabulary and prompts, children can add their ideas in independently.

Using the Voice Notes tool, students 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 students 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 Farm collection in LearningGrids has a wide range of resources with different levels of support that you can use to encourage students to write about their field trip.  

Caption writing

I always found value in keeping some writing tasks short and snappy for early elementary writing. Having activities such as caption writing or labeling built into my planning really helped to develop students’ 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 practicing 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 students 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 students to write their caption. This also works really nicely as a modeling 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 punctuation in early writing 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 students can use the Predictor, spell check, and speech support to help them build their sentence.

Creative writing

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

The repetitive language in stories can often be comforting for children when writing, helping them to find confidence with writing their own story by 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 - perfect for early elementary writing.

These activities provide students 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. Students can access these on devices or simply print them to have a physical copy.

You can make changes to any Clicker resource, tailoring them to meet the needs of your students. For example, quickly add image support into a Word Bank to make it more accessible for a wider group of students.

Having a writing grid available as a prompt (either on screen or printed!) can help to fuel students’ 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 students with meeting their early elementary writing goals.

Clicker is such a flexible tool that you can build into your early elementary classrooms in the way that suits your environment, planning, and students needs most effectively.

I had very limited access to technology in my previous kindergarten classrooms, but the activities I’ve shown throughout this blog post can all be utilized 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 early elementary classroom. You might find our recent post Early reading support with Clicker useful, too!