Introduction

The Clicker Friends series on LearningGrids was designed to provide engaging educational content to support young learners. Each story in the Clicker Friends collection is carefully crafted to encourage reading, writing, and discussion, making it an invaluable resource for teachers and learners alike. You can find the series in the Story Corner section on the LearningGrids website.

Recently, we have undertaken a comprehensive update of the Clicker Friends series to ensure consistency and maximize the learning potential of every story. These updates introduce a cohesive set of resources and activities for each tale, allowing children to explore, respond, and create with confidence. Whether it’s reading a book, building sentences, or engaging in interactive tasks, Clicker Friends provides a rich and supportive environment for literacy development.

In this blog, we’ll explore the refreshed Clicker Friends series and how you can use it to inspire and motivate your learners.

Clicker Friends

Our Clicker Friends collection is based around eight friends and their everyday activities. The characters are:

Billy	Freddie	Lizzie	Maisie
Mary	Robbie	Sally	Tommy

The stories are based on themes of seasonal activities (Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving) or everyday activities that most young children can relate to (going to the park, playing in the playground, going to the beach).

The first Clicker Friends story was published almost 15 years ago.

Earlier stories were created on older versions of Clicker. This meant that some of the stories had different supporting activities.

We have now ensured that all the stories have the same resources available to support students’ learning. This helps users feel confident and familiar with the stories, as they know what to expect.

There are currently 11 stories in Story Corner/Clicker Friends:

• A Day at the Zoo
  
  
• Christmas Time
  
  
• Thanksgiving Traditions
  
  
• A Day at School
  
  
• A Day at the Beach
  
  
• The Show
  
  
• At the Playground
  
  
• A Trip to the Park
  
  
• The Halloween Party
  
  
• The Easter Egg Hunt
  
  
• The Toy Store

The outline of resources to support each story now looks like this:

Read a Book

This is the stimulus story for the family of resources. It follows a simple pattern: there is a page for each child and the activity they are doing. In the simplest stories, there is just one sentence on the page.

A Day at the Zoo simple present tense verb “likes” – always the same verb but a different noun (animal)	Christmas Time simple present tense different verbs each time
A Day at School continuous present tense “is reading,” “is writing,” etc.	Thanksgiving Traditions simple present tense different verbs each time

A Day at the Beach simple past tense ”splashed,” “collected”	The Show simple past tense “sold,” “juggled”

After this, we add some very small steps of progression in the complexity of the sentences – for example, adding simple prepositions or conjunctions.

At the Playground prepositions in each sentence: “down the slide,” “up the net,” “across the bridge”	A Trip to the Park introducing conjunction “and”: “Mary and Billy rode their bikes”

The Halloween Party 2 sentences – simple past tense + adjective in 2nd sentence “Billy carved a pumpkin. The pumpkin was big.”	The Easter Egg Hunt 2 sentences – simple past tense + preposition in 1st sentence and adjective (color) in 2nd sentence “Tommy found an egg behind the shed. The egg was green.”	The Toy Store present tense – the same verbs throughout “is buying/wants,” but a different noun (toy) and verb (to fly, to make), and introducing pronouns (he/she)

Sentence Set

Based on text from the book, we offer a simple sentence building activity with a pop-up (View & Remember) model users can access by clicking the button.

This model allows students to:

• look,
  
  
• cover (hide the model),
  
  
• write,
  
  
• and check (open the model again to check against their writing – and check by hearing their sentence read back when they add a period).

Of course, teachers can also easily change the sentence model offered to provide adapted levels of support:

• None - no model is provided.
  
  
• View & Copy - the model is always visible.
  
  
• Listen - the model is spoken when    is clicked.

Connect Set

Again, based on text from the book, this activity asks children to write by selecting from clusters of words. While there is some progression (depending on the text), we have deliberately kept these very simple.

Sometimes, we give a starter and a choice of endings:

Sometimes, we offer a starter, a choice of middles, and an ending.

Some of these will focus on choosing the correct verb:

Some will focus on choosing the correct preposition:

In the Toy Shop story, we ask the children to create two sentences by selecting the appropriate beginnings, middles, and endings:

Talk Set

A Talk About set using pictures from the book. This is an open-ended activity, so children can approach it at their own level.

They might choose to retell the story they read or focus on particular aspects such as adjectives, verbs, or prepositions.

Matching Set

This is a picture matching activity with a listening focus. A simple sentence from the story is offered as a sound target. Students then choose the matching story picture from the selection.

Make a Book

This activity offers a front cover with a picture and an empty text box for students to add their name as the author. Within the book itself, there is just a single page. Providing just one page means that children can add as many (or as few) pages as they like rather than having a predetermined set number of pages to fill.

The activity book page has an empty picture cell, and students can add a story picture from the picture bank:

There is also an empty text box where children can write independently or use the supporting Word Banks to help them write:

All of the Make a Book resources offer vocabulary support in the pop-up Word Banks. The first tab has the story character names. The next tabs are determined by the complexity and content of the story text. For example, there might be (as in the Halloween Party example below) tabs with Verbs, Adjectives, and Nouns to support students in building text to accompany the pictures (e.g. Billy/carved/a big/pumpkin):

Word Bank

The Word Banks provide key vocabulary for writing about the story. They have two topic grids under the headings: Characters and Story Words. For example:

Clicker Board

The aim of our Clicker Boards is to get children thinking about very basic sentence components. Each board features a picture from the story as the stimulus. Students are asked to think of key components to create a sentence. First, they think about Who? - the “naming part” (subject) of the sentence. Then, they think about Doing what? - the “telling part” (predicate) that gives information about what is happening.

This is designed as an open-ended activity, so children may choose to construct simple or more complex sentences about the pictures. They are not restricted to the text they have read in the story.

So, for the picture below, this looks like:

Who?	Doing what?
Lizzie and Freddie	flew a kite
The children	played
Freddie	ran on the grass

The Board also has a sentence cell to allow children to write (or use the Voice Note to record) the complete sentence (e.g. Lizzie and Freddie flew a kite.).

For all of our Clicker Friends stories, see the Clicker Friends section in Story Corner on LearningGrids, or simply search for Clicker Friends.

We have a whole host of equally engaging stories to explore in our Story Corner category – from Traditional Stories and Fables & World Stories to Myths & Legends. You can also find stories by award-winning children’s author and illustrator, Pete Williamson in our Daisy & Friends section. There are even some Decodable Stories for children who are learning to read through phonics.

If you have any questions about these or any of our LearningGrids resources, please email our Customer Experience team via training@cricksoft.com, or schedule in a free customer care meeting to explore them in more detail.

We recently announced that Clicker users can now access a library of almost 10,000 Widgit Symbols at no extra cost.

This means that you can use Widgit Symbols alongside our already extensive Crick Picture Library of almost 5,000 images.

In our previous blog on the topic, we covered how you can add the symbols into different areas of Clicker such as the Predictor and different types of writing grids.

This time, we are diving into the different ways you can adapt LearningGrids resources with Widgit Symbols, and how doing so can improve understanding for your learners.

Adapting LearningGrids resources with Widgit Symbols

You can add Widgit Symbols into any of our existing resources using the Picturize tool. To Picturize the entire set, navigate to “Edit Mode” and select the “Add Picture(s)” button, then select the Widgit Symbol library, and check or uncheck the option to ignore high frequency words as required. To add symbols to a cell, simply select the cell you want to add an image to.

Widgit Symbols in:

Sentence Sets

Many of the Sentence Sets on LearningGrids work well with symbols. A great place to start is with the Sentence Patterns resources, as they contain simple, repeated sentence structures. You might want to focus your symbol support on the repeated structures, such as I like/can/am/went/like to. Or you can focus on the element of the sentence pattern that changes, such as the noun, verb, or adjective. Try it with I Like to – Sentence Patterns.

Sentence Sets that focus on adjectives work nicely too, as in the Opposites Sentences Sentence Set:

You can also use symbols to support more complex sentence writing, such as the Above, Behind, Under Sentence Set, and instruction writing, such as our Making Gingerbread Cookies set.

Connect Sets

Some of our Connect Sets already contain images, such as the “I Went - Sentence Patterns” set seen below. You can opt to keep or replace the existing Crick Picture Library images when you Picturize these resources. You might want to use Widgit Symbols in both the main picture cell and the component word cells for consistency.

Alternatively, you can create a “next step” challenge by keeping the photorealistic Crick Picture Library image in the main picture cell and using Widgit Symbols in the component word cells so that learners can practice matching the symbol to the concept.

Generally, the simpler Connect Sets work best with Picturize, as in the examples below, where the symbol-supported word cells contain a word or simple phrase:

• I Like – Sentence Patterns
  
  
• Insects
  
  
• 3-D Shape Hunt
  
  
• Colors Around Us

Word Banks

Word Banks are some of the easiest and quickest resources to adapt using Picturize.

The “Quick Words” sets are a great place to start, as the focus is on keywords. Be mindful of words that can have multiple meanings, as this means they will also have multiple associated symbols. For example: bark – verb/noun, bat – animal/sports equipment, fly – noun/verb. Make sure that the image chosen is correct for the context!

It’s easy to change the image to the correct contextual symbol if needed. Simply select the cell in Edit View and use the picture icon to choose the appropriate symbol.

There is a wide range of possibilities for Word Banks with Picturize – it can be used for lower-level, simple vocabulary from Nursery Rhymes and stories, or for subject-specific topics for upper elementary.

(Top tip: Don’t forget you can apply “Maximize Height” to the cells in the grid to optimize the display size of the symbols.)

Word Banks with symbols are also great for supporting:

1. Storytelling: As in these Quick Words resources for Jack and the Beanstalk and Goldilocks.

2. Instructions: As in these Quick Words resources for Make a Birthday Cake and Brushing Your Teeth.

3. Higher level topics: See the Seasons of an Apple Tree, The Solar System, Biomes, and Rivers Quick Words Word Banks for some good examples of this.

Picture Words

We have a selection of Word Banks called Picture Words, which make use of images from the Crick Picture Library. You may want to adapt some of these with Widgit Symbols.

Here’s an example of an existing resource (Woodland Picture Words) which uses images from the Crick Picture Library – and how it compares to a version with Widgit Symbols. You could even offer these “Picture Words” Word Banks with alternate tabs of photorealistic (i.e. Crick Picture Library) images and symbols.

Clicker Boards

Most of the Clicker Boards we create contain lots of “content-free” cells for tasks such as mind mapping.

However, you can still add Widgit Symbols to Clicker Boards to add additional signposting for the cells that do contain text.

For example, you can add Widgit Symbols to the headings in the Shades of Meaning - Adjectives board so that learners have a clear understanding of concepts like “big” or “good” before they try to come up with more intense synonyms for them.

You can also add symbols to the prompts in Clicker Boards, such as Molly Mouse and Synonyms and Antonyms, to ensure that your learners know exactly what they need to add into the empty cells as they complete the activity.

Talk Sets and Matching Sets

Adding symbols to Talk Sets and Matching Sets is a great way to help learners make the connection between the concept and the sound of the word.

To do so, you will need to remove the existing images from the set and replace them with Widgit Symbols. A good tip for doing this quickly is to open a related Word Bank that has already been Picturized with symbols. While creating a Talk or Matching Set and adding in the symbols, use the “In Open Clicker Sets” option to select the symbols that appear in the related Word Bank.

Sets with simple vocabulary work best, such as the Talk Sets  I Can – Sentence Patterns and Jack and the Beanstalk – Key Words.

LearningGrids ‘family’ of symbols-adapted resources

Finally, here’s an example of a complete “family” of resources based on the story The Wind and the Sun, which have been adapted with Widgit Symbols. This gives you an idea of the kinds of linked resources your students could be using with the extra layer of signposting and support offered by symbols.

Have a look through thousands of existing resources on LearningGrids to explore the ways this exciting Clicker and Widgit Symbols collaboration can open up new levels of engagement and understanding for your learners.

If you need any assistance updating to the latest versions of Clicker, contact our Technical Support team. If you have any questions about the new tools and features, we’ve introduced, schedule a customer care meeting with a member of our Customer Experience team.

Bridging the gap between kindergarten and 1st grade is an ongoing challenge in many schools, transitioning from the ethos and learning style of a kindergarten classroom into the curriculum demands of 1st grade, without putting too much pressure on the children can be really difficult! This transition period can take time and patience and how you approach this transition will vary depending on the needs of your students and the routines of your classrooms.

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 students adjust to their new school life.

Reduce student anxiety by helping them to picture the classroom

One of the reasons that the transition can be so intimidating for students is that they don’t know what to expect.

A simple way to account for this is to provide students with resources and 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, students can read simple sentences about a girl called Pam and her school, supported by corresponding images. This resource can easily be used as a base to create an age-appropriate visual guide for students on what to look out for at their school.

Simply swap out the existing images for photos of key areas and staff in your school and edit the text to help your students learn any names and terminology they will need.

(Top Tip: To ensure that any staff names or school-specific terminology are read back to your students correctly, simply add the correct pronunciation and spelling to the Word Pool.)

Collaborate with former 1st graders

New students will have lots of questions about what to expect from their 1st grade journey, and who better to answer them than those who have already gone through it!

You can create interactive activities which can be shared between the grades using either a Talk Set or a Clicker Board with added Voice Notes.

Have your new 1st graders brainstorm all the questions they have, pop them into your Talk Set or Clicker Board, and then pass the activity over to the former 1st grade class to record their answers.

Not only will this help alleviate some of the anxiety new students may be experiencing, it’s also a great way to consolidate the previous class’s learning and assess how well they understood the lessons and expectations they learned the previous year.

Adapt for ELL students

For English language learners, the new year comes with the added challenge of learning a lot of new vocabulary. There are a number of school-specific activities in the New To English section of LearningGrids, and you can learn more about using Clicker to support ELL students by reading our blog, How to spot growth in English Leaners during the silent period.

Use visual schedules to help students adjust to their new routine

The new routine will probably be the biggest adjustment for your 1st graders.

At the start of the school year, they will have just come back from summer break, and for many children their last experience of school would have followed a more free form of 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 hours at a time for more structured lessons.

Regardless of what your daily routine looks like, visual schedules are a great way to help students learn and remember routines, removing the stress of not knowing what comes next and reducing the number of times you have to explain that it’s not lunchtime yet!

To start making visual schedule for your class, search for "visual schedule" 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 schedule for the whole day. Students 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 students get distracted by thinking too far ahead.
  
  
• The Now, Next, Then Connect Set: Assigning this to students will allow them to practice forming sentences with the key words and phrases from the schedule, helping to embed it in their memory while also giving them an opportunity to  practice early sentence structure.

(Top tip: If you want to reuse images in multiple sets, you can select “In Open Clicker Sets” when browsing for images in the Picture menu.)

Start building independence

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

The Stuck List is a great resource that you can use to remind your students to attempt their work independently before asking for help. You can fill in the spaces ahead of time so students 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 students 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 students are handling the changes

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

You can assign the Daily Check-in set (or whichever resource from the “Feelings and Actions” section of LearningGrids works best) as often as you need to keep track of how your class is coping with the transition into the next phase of their learning and spot any students who might need some extra support.

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

• Early reading support with Clicker
  
  
• Clicker - A day in 1st grade
  

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

What is adaptive teaching?

Adaptive teaching has become a key focus in classrooms, aimed at making learning more inclusive and accessible to all students. This approach enables teachers to tailor their instructions to diverse learning needs without lowering expectations.   

Implementing adaptive strategies can be difficult, especially when trying to balance the diverse needs of students with the constraints of time and resources. With Clicker, teachers can overcome common barriers to adaptive teaching and create an inclusive learning environment where every student can thrive. 

Our three-level Clicker Books and writing grids are designed to support students of all abilities. This means everyone can access the same topic content in a way that suits their reading and writing needs.

The resources are designed to work hand-in-hand, providing a consistent and inclusive approach to learning that encourages students to engage with reading and writing across the curriculum.

Three-level books for adaptive teaching and reading support

Clicker’s three-level books are a fantastic new resource for reading support in the classroom. Each book is available in three distinct reading levels, ensuring every students - whether emergent, struggling, or fluent readers - can dive into the same topic content.

Read It Yourself 📖

Content: One simple sentence per page, designed for students who are just starting to read independently. The focus is on decoding and basic comprehension. 

Support: On each page children are encouraged to attempt reading the sentence for themselves. However, the words can be read aloud by clicking on them, or a speaker button can be added to offer maximum scaffolding.

Purpose: This level is ideal for emergent readers who need support with word recognition but are encouraged to engage independently. 

Read in Steps 📘

Content: Multiple simple sentences on a page. This version is ideal for students who need more support to break down information. 

Support: “Bite-sized” chunks of information in short sentences so students access small pieces of information one bit at a time. Text-to-speech feedback is available throughout.

Purpose: The focus here is on breaking down complex ideas into manageable parts, allowing students to access information at their own pace.

Read a Book 📙

Content: This level offers the most complex text, with longer, in-depth explanations and more challenging vocabulary. So, this book type is perfect for students who are confident readers.

Support: A speaker button is offered to develop reading fluency in longer pieces of text. Students can also click on individual words to hear more complex words read aloud.

Purpose: At this stage, students work with more ambitious content, requiring a deeper understanding of the subject matter and the ability to express their ideas through written responses. 

While the text complexity changes across levels, the topic content stays the same. This means students can explore the same subjects together, no matter their reading ability, encouraging inclusion and shared learning experiences.

Clicker writing grids for adaptive teaching writing support

Clicker’s writing grids have always been a staple for supporting writing development, and a customer favorite.

They offer three levels of support that align perfectly with their Clicker Book counterpart:

Sentence Sets 🖊️

Students recreate exact sentences from the books, reinforcing reading and writing connections. These align with Read It Yourself Clicker Books.

Connect Sets ✍️

Students match sentence fragments (beginnings, middles, and endings) to build their own sentences, combining structure with creativity. Connect Sets match our Read in Steps Clicker Books.

Word Banks 📝

Topic-specific vocabulary banks that help more independent writers express their understanding using key words from the books. Word Banks are organized in tabs to provide access alphabetically or through topic areas. They accompany our Read a Book Clicker Books.

How Clicker’s reading and writing resources work together

Clicker's writing activities mirror the content of the three-level books, ensuring a seamless transition from reading to writing. As a result, students feel more confident as they move between reading and writing tasks, reinforcing their understanding and skills.

The magic of Clicker’s resources lies in how they complement each other. To begin, students can read about a topic at a level that suits them. Then they can move on to writing activities that reinforce what they’ve learned. As a result, students are supported in both reading comprehension and writing skills which helps them engage more deeply with the curriculum.

Clicker’s flexibility also makes it a powerful tool for adaptive teaching. Whether a student needs additional scaffolding or is ready for more independent tasks, Clicker enables teachers to tailor reading and writing activities to suit individual learning needs.

For example, a students might read about the Shang Dynasty at their reading level and then use a matching writing grid to create sentences, connect ideas, or write independently using topic-specific vocabulary.

This method keeps learning cohesive and accessible, no matter where a student is on their learning journey.

What are the benefits of using Clicker’s three-level books and writing grids? 

• Inclusive curriculum 🫶: By offering different levels of content on the same topic, Clicker ensures that every student, no matter their reading level, can engage with the subject matter and demonstrate understanding. 
  

• Scaffolded support 🏗️: The books provide scaffolds - from simple sentences to complex vocabulary - that progressively build students’ skills, ensuring that no one is left behind. 
  
  
• Flexibility in teaching 🔀: Teachers can use the books to support adaptive teaching, modifying the pace, support, and materials to meet the diverse needs of their class. This approach aligns perfectly with the goal of personalized learning - tailoring instruction to the individual needs of each learner. 

Extra activities to reinforce curriculum learning

Beyond reading and writing resources, Clicker offers a range of interactive activities for children to respond to the text and demonstrate their knowledge and understanding:

• Talk Sets 🔊: Students can discuss topics and share ideas aloud, building speaking and listening skills.
  
  
• Clicker Board 🎨: Learners can manipulate and link any combination of words, pictures and sounds as they summarize the text.
  
  
• Make a Book 📕: Students create their own books based on what they’ve learned, encouraging creativity, understanding, and retelling.

These activities provide varied ways for students to interact with content. Consequently, learning is more dynamic, enjoyable, and inclusive as students choose how to show their understanding.

Find out more about Clicker's inclusive learning resources

🔍 The science of reading and Clicker's decodable books

🧮 Early writing – planning and pre-teaching with LearningGrids

📖 How to make reading more accessible in inclusive classrooms

📹 On-demand webinars: Free recordings of our fantastic webinars. Explore how Clicker can support a variety of learners, needs, and settings.

We recently published some Clicker LearningGrids resources aimed at facilitating self check-in for attendance - so here’s a spotlight and overview of how and why you might want to use these in your own settings.

Self check-in is a process where students take an active role in checking themselves in at the beginning of each day or session. Instead of teachers calling out names or completing this task themselves, students take an active role by choosing their names or pictures and displaying them in a designated area. It streamlines this daily process – so it saves teachers’ time – but it also offers many educational and developmental advantages.

It fosters independence, decision making, and communication skills – by allowing students to choose and display their names or pictures, they develop a sense of independence and responsibility. It also provides an opportunity for interactions with teachers and peers, encouraging students to practice their communication and social skills. These skills, in turn, help to build students’ self-confidence.

Our Class Attendance Clicker Board can be used to create a record of who is in class today. Find a picture/name cell and move it to the right-hand side of the Board to show which students are here today. Of course, the idea is that you add pictures/names of the students in your class. When everyone has checked in, take the opportunity for some math practice: count up the total number and use the microphone button to record how many students are in class today. 

Alternatively, our Class Attendance Connect Set enables students to write about who is in class. Once again, cells in this resource can be edited to include pictures/names of the students in your class. 

Finally, there’s a Make a Book resource in which students add names and pictures from the banks provided (which you can personalize with your own pictures/names). 

Self check-in can also be used to support students’ emotional development. By including emotion symbols, students can express how they are feeling at the start of the day. Or see School Day Report for a Connect Set which includes a simple frame to write about feelings at the end of the day.

For these and other resources based on school, feelings, and many more topics, see LearningGrids.

The challenges faced by students learning English as an additional language are multi-layered. They are not only learning English but also learning curriculum subjects through English. 

Very often, a student’s technological skills are more advanced than their second language skills. So, providing them with supportive tools such as DocsPlus can really help them to develop their English skills. I wanted to explore some ideas for using the WorkSpace tool in DocsPlus to facilitate an important aspect of an English learner’s journey. 

The Bell Foundation is an organization that aims to enable English learners to overcome disadvantage through language education. It identifies Five Principles of EL pedagogy – the first of which is recognizing multilingualism (a learner’s ability to listen, speak, read, and/or write in one or more languages) as an asset. 

So why is multilingualism so important?

• Multilingualism is a valuable resource! Students can draw on their ability to listen, speak, read, or write in one or more languages to support their acquisition of English as well as their learning of curriculum subject content. 
  
• A student’s home language is an important part of their identity.  
  
• For English learners to feel confident and have positive self-esteem, they need to feel proud of their bilingual skills and heritage. 

And how can WorkSpace in DocsPlus help? 

Using visuals is a great way to support understanding of content. We can use images such as diagrams or photos in a WorkSpace resource to reinforce the concept we are teaching. For example, we might be considering animal life cycles – we can add an image to represent the stages of the life cycle with callouts and labels to add information. By including Voice Notes with each label cell, the student could record what they want to say before writing. Additionally, we might want to duplicate the WorkSpace so that the student can record and add notes in their first language to support their learning.  

Another way to do this might be to use a labeled diagram with callout labels to add the corresponding text in the student’s home language. 

You could also use a Frayer Model idea (a graphical organizer for word analysis and vocabulary building) to explore and contextualize subject-specific vocabulary. It’s a great way of allowing a student time to think and process new vocabulary and learning. 

In summary, the benefits of using a student’s first language alongside English include: 

• It supports an EL student’s language learning – literacy skills in their first language are transferable and will support their acquisition of an additional language. 
  
• It also supports language learning of their peers – encouraging other students in the class to learn the student’s home language is equally beneficial to their learning. 
  
• It promotes inclusion, empathy, and self-esteem – the student feels included and valued, and his/her peers are able to appreciate some of the difficulties the EL student may be facing. 

With these benefits in mind, it’s great to see how DocsPlus – and WorkSpace – are able to support English learners in our classrooms. For ready-made resources to support a range of subjects across the curriculum, head to LearningGrids. 

We usually think of “time” as a mathematical concept, but it is interesting to get your students to consider the important role it plays in many scientific topics as well.

Here’s a quick dive into some of our Clicker resources on LearningGrids where time is integral to the science.

Time of the Dinosaurs

From time long ago, get your students thinking about how we know so much about dinosaurs today with our Fossils book and supporting activities. They can also prepare an oral presentation of the fossilization process over time using the Fish to Fossil Talk Set.

Evolution and Adaptation Over Time

Students can write about how living things inherit features and characteristics from their parents and how these can gradually change over time to help them survive, with our resources on Evolution. They can use our Animal Adaptations mind mapping activity and Word Bank to brainstorm and write about special adaptations that animals have developed over time to suit the environment in which they live.

Seasonal Change Over Time

Perhaps seasonal change is your focus. See our Seasons of an Apple Tree book to read about how the tree changes over the seasons of a year. Or use the Connect Set to write about the changes using sentence starters and endings.

Find all of these – and many more science-related Clicker resources – on LearningGrids.

Getting students to write confidently within a range of nonfiction genres is no easy task. But our set of WorkSpace planners for DocsPlus on LearningGrids could be just what you’re looking for if you have students starting out or struggling with writing nonfiction text types. The planners are designed to help students organize what they want to say, within a framework that is adapted to the specific writing genre. What’s more, you can use our WorkSpace planners on Win/Mac and iPad/Chromebook, so your students can have access to this fantastic tool wherever they are in school.

Let’s begin by looking at the Discussion Planner. The framework is clearly set out to encourage the thought process involved – students are guided to list their title, key points on both sides (for and against), and a conclusion.

Once the ideas have been added – you might even want to use Voice Notes so students can record key ideas and prompts – the next stage in the process can begin.

Simply by clicking on the export tool, students can use their work as direct support for their own writing. They can send their planner to the document as an image or as text. They can even create a supportive Wordbar (a bank of key words/phrases) with the text from their planner.

This introductory video to WorkSpace is a brilliant tool to understand how to best support your students’ plan and organise their writing.

There is also a Discussion Frame Wordbar available on LearningGrids, which supports students writing an argument or discussion text on any topic, providing them with a writing frame, general words and phrases, link words and phrases, and a tab to add topic-specific vocabulary.

Find these resources – as well as a range of other planners and frames for different nonfiction genres, including explanation, procedure, report, and recount – by typing ”Planner” into LearningGrids. And if you have any questions at all, our friendly team are here to answer them - email us at usinfo@cricksoft.com or call us at 203 221 2697.

Did you know that May is National Share-A-Story Month? Storytelling is a great way of getting your students actively engaged and motivated in sharing stories with others, so if you’re looking for some inspiration, why not take a look at LearningGrids? We have lots of resources to support all children – even those who are not so confident – in accessing the power of story sharing.

Oral storytelling offers huge benefits in developing children’s language and literacy skills, and a fantastic boost to those children who struggle to get their ideas down with pen and paper. For many children, being able to ‘talk’ their story allows them to fully express themselves in a way that pen and paper may limit. With Clicker, children can not only practise their storytelling but also record it – so it’s a great assessment record. They can rehearse in a comfortable setting – on their own or with a partner – until they are happy, and then share their finished work as a presentation to the class. Retelling stories orally helps children to practise and internalise story patterns and language, as well as developing an understanding of narrative ‘building blocks’ like characters, settings and plot build-up.

Search for Tell the Story Talk Sets on LearningGrids to find lots of resources (covering fiction and non-fiction topics) which offer a framework for children’s oral retelling skills. A really fun one is the Mexican folktale of Señor Coyote and the Cheese. Children will love retelling the story of the greedy coyote and the clever rabbit who outwits him! We also have brilliant Nursery Rhyme resources that children love reading, singing and adding actions to.

Storytelling is about being expressive and having fun – let Clicker help your children do just that whilst developing their creative skills.

For more information on how Clicker can support story telling and literacy at your school, you can contact our friendly team at info@cricksoft.com!

As I’m sure you are already aware, WorkSpace – our intuitive planning tool – is now built in to the DocsPlus App. This is particularly exciting news for us on the Curriculum Team here at Crick, as it means that our iPad and Chromebook users have access to this fantastic tool – as well as hundreds of ready-made free WorkSpace resources on LearningGrids!

There are already over 200 WorkSpace resources available, covering curriculum areas from English Language and Literature to Science, Geography and History topics. I thought it might be useful to give a quick – but by no means comprehensive – overview of some of the different types of WorkSpace activities you can find in our LearningGrids resource bank.

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Mind Maps

You’ll find lots of simple mind maps on all sorts of topics. In the examples below, students can make notes to outline the development of the Women's Suffrage Movement or to plan writing about the significance of key events in Macbeth. Students can add words, phrases, images – and even Voice Notes as a powerful way to capture thoughts and record initial ideas before writing.

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Creative Work

Mind maps can also be used as a stimulus for creative writing, for example by collecting words and phrases to describe a scene in a particular setting or to develop a character by considering their attributes and characteristics.

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Complex Mind Maps

Mind maps can of course be more complex and include sub-topics or sub-branches to really drill down into ideas. For example, students might be collecting information for writing about the habitat, plants and animals of the Great Barrier Reef, or considering immediate and long-term effects of the Black Death on medieval society.

Complex mind maps like these encourage students to not just make notes but to begin organising ideas – helping with the structure of the writing when that stage of the task begins. For example, students might consider the social, economic, environmental and political impacts of a tropical storm, or outline for/against arguments in a debate about the use of nuclear power. Remember, the WorkSpace can be sent to a DocsPlus document as a diagram or an essay outline, so students really have a solid foundation from which to begin their writing. A WorkSpace can even be transformed into a Wordbar for useful vocabulary support at the writing stage.

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Tables and Charts

A WorkSpace can also be presented as a table or chart for organising and comparing – a claim to the throne in History, properties and behaviors of metals and nonmetals in Science, or even comparing countries in Geography.

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Images

A WorkSpace can even be used for making notes about images – for example, adding notes about major parts of the human brain, or analysing a historical artefact under key headings.

These are just a few of the great ways to use WorkSpace in DocsPlus across the curriculum. Visit LearningGrids for hundreds of other ideas.

We connected with Book Dash to inquire about supporting the resources through Clicker on LearningGrids – and received an enthusiastic response from Director Dorette Louw, confirming that we could indeed use any of the books, ending her email with the words: “We adore seeing what happens to our stories once they’re out in the world!”

A huge appeal of the stories is the range of diverse representation. So we eagerly got to work looking through the available titles (there are hundreds!) and seeing which might work well with Clicker.

The stories – all beautifully illustrated and unique – are mostly aimed at early readers and include wordless picture books too.

The first two of these books have now been published on LearningGrids:

• How Do You Sleep?
• Goldfish Genius

How Do You Sleep?

This story is beautiful, and the images are really engaging and appealing to young children.

The Reading Book has strong repetition and the graphics are so much fun – my personal favourite is definitely the owl page … and yes baby owls really do sleep on their faces! When creating the book, we could have used the images without the text, but we wanted to stay as faithful as possible to the original, especially as we felt the layout of the text was such an important design feature.

As well as making the book available for readers online, we also wanted to offer additional supporting activities where possible and relevant. For this story, we have created a Make a Book activity (where children can write about the story using beginnings/middles/endings).

There’s also a Sentence, Connect, and Talk Set to enable differentiated levels of response according to individual needs. A Board Set allows children to organise ideas about how the animals in the story sleep and about how they sleep.

Goldfish Genius

Another fun title, and one of Book Dash’s wordless stories. To distinguish this from our usual "Read a Book" sets, we called the stimulus story book a "Picture Book". Wordless picture books like this are important early reading resources as they help children learn to infer what is happening in the story – since there no words, they have to figure out the story using the pictures and their imagination. This is vital in helping to develop not only comprehension but also an overall understanding of story structure and plot.

To support this story, we also have a Make a Book activity, a Talk Set and a Clicker Board so children can record – through writing, captions or speaking – their own interpretation of what is happening in the text-free story.

We hope to add more Book Dash stories and supporting resources to LearningGrids in the future. We are so grateful for this opportunity and super excited to share a more diverse range of stories and characters in our Story Corner category on LearningGrids.

According to lecturer in education Dr Kirstin Mulholland, everyone needs a ‘stuck list’. She shared her advice in a recent article about classroom strategies to support students to work and tackle challenges in their learning independently, minimising the first port of call being to ask an adult for help. If this is something you use or are thinking of using, it’s worth considering how Clicker might be an important feature on your own ‘stuck list’.

Developing independence is at the very heart of Clicker, offering multi-layered support and equipping children with strategies that they can use without the assistance of an adult. These include:

• A child-friendly spell checker which is speech supported; children can listen to a word before using it.
• Speech feedback with realistic-sounding children’s voices; students can hear their work read back to them, encouraging them to actively review and self-correct their work.
• A library of over 4500 curriculum-related pictures which can be used as visual support in documents and writing grids – a valuable tool for supporting literacy development.
• Voice Notes which enable students to record their own audio notes before they write; they can rehearse their sentences or capture initial thoughts and ideas. Or use Voice Notes to add instructions for a task so children can check and re-check as and when they need to.
• Intelligent word prediction to support struggling spellers and encourage students to use more adventurous vocabulary; like the spell checker, the predictor is speech supported, so children can check words before using them.
• Accessible-for-all curriculum content with talking Clicker Books, Matching Sets and Talk Sets to develop speaking and listening skills – perfect for emergent or struggling readers and EAL students.
• Writing Grids which enable students to write with whole words and phrases. Emerging writers can build sentences word-by-word, while Word Banks provide scaffolding to support developing writers.
• Free resources to support the curriculum with LearningGrids, an ever-growing bank of ready-made resources, covering a wide range of subjects and topics.

At the start of the school year, you could use Clicker Board to create a thinking map of strategies with your class – including those above, or other strategies such as using a paper/online dictionary, looking at previous work in their books or examples on the whiteboard, or turning to the person next to you for help and advice.

Once you've finished the thinking map, you can send the text content to the Document and so create a written list which can be clearly displayed in the classroom as a reference point throughout the year.

As Dr Mulholland points out, creating a list like this with your class makes our expectations of independent working explicit and supports children to take ownership and control of their learning. It develops children’s understanding of themselves as learners (metacognition) – how they learn best and how to overcome any obstacles or barriers they meet.

So, if it’s not something you’re already using, why not give the ‘stuck list’ a go and think about how Clicker and our free resources on LearningGrids might form a vital part of your ‘stuck list’ toolkit, helping your students to help themselves.

Clicker is a great tool in supporting learners at all stages of their literacy journey. With lots of recent talk about cognitive load theory and its implications on learning, I wanted to explore some ideas about how Clicker can help.

First the science …

Children are often bombarded with information and ideas when they are learning new topics, and not surprisingly, this can be overwhelming! Often, they grasp some of the learning, but not quite all – and this impacts not only the present but also future learning outcomes.

It’s all to do with our “working (short-term) memory” and how it can only deal with a limited amount of information at any one time. Too much and the result, according to educational psychologist John Sweller, is “cognitive overload”. When we exceed the capacity of our working memory, our learning is impeded.

There are strategies to reduce the load on short-term memory, and many of these are well supported and facilitated by Clicker. Essentially, children need to build up a secure store of knowledge in their long-term memory – so they can draw on it when they meet new topics and don’t rely solely on (and overload) their short-term memory. The trick is making sure that the knowledge has been processed and fully understood in the children’s working memory first – if it has, it will be transferred to their long-term memory to support future learning.

Activating prior knowledge before starting work on new learning, encourages children to pull what they have previously learned (from their long-term memory) into their working (short-term) memory. They can then take the new information, building it onto what they already know, to create a more developed body of knowledge to store in their long-term memory for future learning.

Cloze activities in Clicker are a great way to revisit key concepts and assess children’s knowledge and understanding – as well as identifying any “gaps”. Satisfyingly quick and easy to create – simply add any text into a Cloze Document and remove keywords to check knowledge.

Say for example, we are learning about how plants grow in science. Before we begin reading our Plant Life Cycle book, we might want to do a quick recap on the names and functions of plant parts, as these will be terms revisited in a new context. So we could create a quick retrieval practice Cloze activity (I used the text from the Clicker Book About Plants – Read a Book). Prior knowledge is consolidated, and we are ready to move onto the new learning about how each these parts grows as part of a plant’s life cycle.

Other types of low-stakes retrieval exercises – such as Matching or Talk – also provide valuable extra practice, reinforce memory and ascertain what children do (and don’t) know. You could also use a Clicker Board at the start or end of a lesson and/or topic to create a mind map to summarise previous knowledge and understanding. Get children to use Talk Sets to orally demonstrate knowledge. They could research a topic for 10 minutes and then record an information podcast about 10 key points. Many of our Reading Books are linked to complementary Talk Sets, so this is often an activity on LearningGrids that is ready to go!

Research shows that providing frameworks and models can also support learners. The frames act as a prop, freeing up working memory capacity which then builds onto their long-term memory. The models can be gradually “faded” (removed) to encourage more independent working as learners’ knowledge and confidence grow, so they get the right level of support at each stage.

Continuing with the plants theme, we might start with a Sentence Set which offers a clear model to write simple sentences about parts of a plant. The next stage might be a structured writing frame with a lot of information, like our Connect Set on the same topic. This could be followed by a “frame” in the form of a Word Bank with less structure and information, although vocabulary is still arranged in topic tabs for a softer level of guidance. The ultimate goal is that learners are able to work without a writing frame, although we could still offer vocabulary in an A – Z format which requires much more independent application.

These are all great features of Clicker which can help with memory capacity and retention. Search on LearningGrids for a range of activities, including Sentence Sets, Connect Sets and Word Banks.

Our Decodable Stories on LearningGrids for Clicker are perfect for early learners starting out on systematic phonic work. They build on children’s knowledge of the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the skills of blending phonemes through a word to read it.

The stories and supporting activities focus on reinforcement and application of synthetic knowledge and skills in reading and writing contexts. The carefully levelled activities provide opportunities for children to apply their phonic knowledge across a range of recording, reading and writing activities to help build their confidence and develop a level of automaticity in using phonemes and graphemes.

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.

For each letter group, there is a Clicker Book (including a Read It Yourself version), a Sentence, Connect and Talk Set. The text is based on phonically decodable text and common exception words and includes the phonemes/graphemes appropriate for the level – the target phonemes/graphemes for the letter group as well as cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups.

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)

All of these beautifully-illustrated stories and activities are available now on LearningGrids. We are continuing to work on additional activities to support early synthetic phonics work. These will include Matching and Speaking/Listening activities that introduce and focus on the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences (within the phoneme groups), enabling children to learn new letters and sounds then practise grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Watch this space!

I recently read an interesting article that considered the use of worksheets in schools. It’s a contentious issue, especially in the light of environmental concerns. Whatever your views, we thought we would offer up our top 5 alternatives to using worksheets with Clicker.

1. Use Cloze activities in Clicker as a great way to assess your students’ topic comprehension, reading skills, and ability to use semantic and contextual clues to reconstruct a piece of text. You can paste in any text and create activities in seconds! It’s great for low-stakes testing and informal assessments. And it’s so easy to customize so students get the right level of challenge – making this a versatile and targeted activity, rather than simply a ‘one-size-fits-all’ worksheet. Even better, once an activity has been completed, teachers can find out at a glance how students have done by viewing the ‘Analytics’ tab.

2. Use our Storyboard templates on LearningGrids when children are planning for writing – they can add pictures and/or words to plan out ideas (ranging from simple beginning/middle/ending formats to more complex build-up/problem/resolution formats). The bonus with this on-screen story planner is that children can record ideas too – and for many children who struggle with writing, this is an ideal way of getting started.

3. We have a range of Connect Sets for all ages in Clicker and these can be a great worksheet alternative. You might be focusing on particular sentence grammar aspects as in our Expanding Sentences resource. Children can explore different ways of enhancing their sentences and the options offered encourage them to become more adventurous in their use of language. And of course, as with all Clicker Sets, when they send their sentence to the document, they get instant speech feedback, so they can evaluate and re-draft as they go. At the very early stage of simple sentence construction, you can use Clicker’s ‘Guided Order’ facility, so students are forced to choose sentence components in a grammatically ordered way. AND, as with all Clicker Sets, students can listen to any word or phrase before adding it to their sentence, encouraging them to be independent.

4. Matching is a great activity in Clicker, whether it’s matching pictures, words or sounds. What’s more, it’s so easy to change the focus of the activity instantly by simply changing the target or choice! So, for some students a straight word-to-picture matching activity is appropriate, but for others, you may want to offer additional support by changing the matching choice to ‘picture and word’. And Matching is not just for younger students – you could use it for matching fractions to picture representations in maths, or matching pictures of river features to their names in geography.

5. Clicker Board is a great worksheet alternative and can be used in so many ways – for organising ideas, making notes and preparing for writing. In our Setting the Scene resources, children add adjectives to describe a setting – easy enough to do on a worksheet, BUT with Board you can convert the collection of descriptive words into a Word Bank, giving a child instant appropriate support as they move on to the next stage of writing.

So, there we have just a few ideas (from so many I could have chosen) of where I think Clicker would most certainly be a better alternative to the traditional paper-based worksheet. Not just from an environmental and logistical perspective but from an educational perspective too. Clicker goes beyond the worksheet offering and encourages children to become independent, self-reliant, reflective and more confident learners. And that is truly worth its weight in gold!

According to recent research by the NFER, elementary students are lagging two months behind in reading and maths due to school disruptions during the Covid crisis. And what’s worse is that disadvantaged students are seven months behind their peers in both subjects.

This growing attainment gap and the pandemic’s impact on learning is heart-breaking, but we hope that we are able to support you and your students through this challenging time. It’s not necessarily about catching up, but rather about finding out where children are and giving them the necessary “stepping stones” to facilitate their progress in learning.

So, how can we help? A great starting point is to head to our Story Corner category on LearningGrids. Children are sure to find something of interest – whether that’s traditional stories, myths and legends or even phonically decodable stories. If it’s non-fiction texts you’re after, try our Find Out and Write About collection of linked reading and writing grids on a range of geography, history and science topics. Or simply choose Clicker Books in the Clicker Resources list on the LearningGrids home page. You’ll be offered a list of hundreds of books on many different topics and aimed at many different abilities.

The great thing about many of our Clicker Books is the level of support built-in as part of Clicker itself and also with follow-up support activities so that children can actively consolidate their learning.

With our Clicker Books, use the speaker button to hear the text on the page read aloud. (Click/tap it again at any point to stop). This is a great way of encouraging children to be independent in their reading. You might be sharing the book on-screen with a whole class. Why not get children to have a go at reading the text – where they get stuck, they can click/tap on any word to have that word read aloud. Another great way of encouraging children to take those small next steps in becoming independent (and confident) readers. With many of our Clicker “Read a Book” sets, we also offer “Read It Yourself” versions, which are designed to encourage children to read themselves (no microphone button is offered, although this can very easily be added if required).

Children can consolidate and reinforce their learning from these books by using any of the follow-up resources as appropriate – for example, they may want to retell the story or talk about what they have read. Or they can tackle different writing tasks based on the text with varying levels of difficulty – from simple sentence building through to topic Word Banks.

While our main focus is literacy, we are still able to offer some curriculum resources for maths – and this very much follows the format as for the books above, and with all the supporting features of Clicker. From simple Counting Books and follow-up activities, to reading about fractions and tackling an equivalent fractions matching activity.

Clicker is such a versatile program which can be used across the school – and with children presenting so many differing needs after disruption to learning, a program like Clicker, which can be so uniquely presonalized to their individual requirements, is a fantastic investment.

As schools close for the summer break, there is an air of anticipation of how we can all use this time not just to reflect and refresh, but to keep developing minds working and growing.

Let’s help children to feel calm and settled, and most importantly inspired and ready to face all the challenges of the new academic year.

The Oak National Academy (who provide free video lessons to support elementary and secondary schools) have created a summer learning support guide.

As part of this, they have identified priority units and lessons in key curriculum subjects, so it’s a great way for children to consolidate or fill gaps in knowledge and understanding. You might find our growing bank of free LearningGrids resources invaluable for additional follow-up activities. We’ve put this guide together with a few ideas to keep children engaged in learning.

Struggling to get them started on a creative writing task? Get them planning their thoughts and ideas with one of our storyboards, analysing a character from a favourite tv show or even writing about their favourite footballer or edge-of-the-seat football match (there may be one or two this summer!).

Keep it fun and relaxed, don’t let it become a battle. Explore our LearningGrids library to find something that excites the child or children you are working with.

Subtitles are great, aren’t they? The only problem is, sometimes they miss the mark (cue the hilarity when the word displayed isn’t quite what the speaker intended). There’s been much talk lately of switching on television subtitles to boost children’s reading skills which is a great idea. Here at Crick, we are number one fans of the multi-sensory approach to literacy. All those layers – seeing the word, hearing it, seeing an associated picture cue – all work together to support children’s cognitive acquisition of phonics knowledge and sight-words.

So, let’s return to that little television subtitles snag … I’m hearing the words, seeing the text … but they don’t match. Confusion reigns! But don’t give up on that idea of seeing and hearing text to boost reading. It’s a feature which sits at the very heart of Clicker, and so important.

Any text in Clicker – whether that’s something that has been presented in a Clicker Book, or something children have written themselves in the Document – can be read aloud to the child by Clicker’s authentic (child voice) speech feedback. And not just that, it’s highlighted too as each word is read. So, we get that instant visual and aural reinforcement. Really simple – but hugely powerful to early or struggling readers. And especially fantastic if you are working with children new to English language. (See our New to English range available FREE on LearningGrids.)

We were recently asked about using DocsPlus to support students in Vocational subject studies. With Wordbars to support structured written work and WorkSpaces to organise ideas and plan for writing, it’s certainly a great program to support your students.

In terms of content on LearningGrids, you will find ready-made vocabulary support for some vocational subjects within our curriculum categories – for example, a Healthy Human Diet Wordbar in our Science category for studies in Health and Catering.

As you can imagine, comprehensive coverage across the vast number of different courses (and exam boards) is a bit tricky. And with the style of written work expected from students often being quite particular to contextual situations (multiple-choice questions, report card/form filling etc.), providing ready-made content may not always be a good fit. However, what’s great about DocsPlus is how incredibly quick and easy it is to make truly presonalized resources from scratch, which are absolutely the right fit for your courses and your students.

For example, as part of a Hair and Beauty course, we are looking at health and safety. Students are asked for responses to a range of different hazards that might be met. We could use a mind map in WorkSpace offering different hazard scenarios, and students make notes in response to each hazard. And what’s more, we can export the content of the plan to a document for direct support while writing.

Another example might be to get students to add labels to a diagram from a textbook or a photograph from a case study – such as a vehicle system as part of a Motor Vehicle course. And once the words have been added, they can be highlighted and used to create a Wordbar, so students have access to relevant vocabulary to support any additional writing.

This is just an outline of how the features of DocsPlus can be applied to any subject – both within and beyond the curriculum – where writing or planning is involved. For more information about getting the best out of all of the features of DocsPlus, see our fantastic video support tutorials for DocsPlus on the Crick Software website.

Flipped learning is by no means a new concept, but the technique has certainly seen a revival due to the Coronavirus pandemic and an increase in remote learning. For those new to this idea, flipped learning is an approach whereby traditional teaching methods – exposing children to new material or ideas in the classroom, then consolidating knowledge outside the classroom with homework – are quite literally ‘flipped’! So, children learn new content at home, and then use classroom time for further practice, consolidation and extension.

The benefit of this approach is that the children can really take their time at home, learning the essentials about the new content, and then come to school ready with background knowledge and further questions about the topic. The classroom becomes the place for active and deeper learning, as children explore questions and resolve any misunderstandings through collaborative interaction with their peers and teachers.

Here at Crick, we think that Clicker is a fantastic platform for delivering accessible and engaging content to acquire initial knowledge outside of the classroom in this flipped learning approach. Let’s take a look at two examples to highlight how this might work for you.

Children learning about the water cycle as part of their geography studies could read our Clicker Book on the topic at home. With built-in reading support, the text is accessible to all readers. They can read independently – or even share the book with parents or carers at home, who therefore increase their own understanding and confidence in supporting their child’s home learning. Children are in control when they are learning this way – they can read and re-read the text as much as they need to and pause to really reflect on and absorb what they have read. This gives you more time as the teacher to actively support and extend the children’s learning after their reading. Get them to use the Talk Set to explain the process they have learned about, or demonstrate their understanding by writing about the stages of the water cycle using word bank support.

There are so many topics covered on LearningGrids that you’re sure to find something to engage your students in this flipped classroom learning approach. You may even want to take on bigger topics – take a look at our collection of Find Out and Write About titles. As these titles are split into smaller sub-topics, you might even get children to focus on different aspects of the topic – for example, in your Ancient Egyptians topic, one child reads about farming, another about pyramids, another about gods and pharaohs.

What a great way to get children fired up about and really engaging with their learning. It’s in their hands, which hopefully means they are full of enthusiasm and bursting with excitement to share their learning and questions when they are back with the group!