Introduction

Recently, more schools have requested online training for using Clicker with younger learners, especially emergent readers and early reading.  

As a former early elementary teacher, I use my experience in these sessions to showcase how many of Clicker's key features are beneficial for these students.

Here are the four key elements of teaching early reading that I would focus on supporting with Clicker: 

1. Exploring vocabulary 
2. Decoding
3. Using expression 
4. Comprehension and understanding

Exploring vocabulary with early readers

Matching Sets

I am a huge advocate of using Matching Sets to support with those vital early reading skills. They are a flexible resource and intuitive for children to use independently. They also make a great teaching tool on your interactive whiteboard! Matching Sets enable students to match words, pictures, and sounds to rehearse and consolidate new vocabulary. 

I would often pre-teach vocabulary ahead of a new topic or text, and Matching Sets are a fantastic way to do this. In my experience, letting students explore new words and connect them to their sounds and images helps them read more confidently on their own. 

Teaching vocabulary is crucial for early reading, so LearningGrids offers numerous ready-made Matching Sets on various topics.

Decoding resources for early reading

Having taught younger learners, I know how important phonics activities are to help students build confidence decoding new words.

Our fantastic phonics resources on LearningGrids are easy to build into your planning to support your phonics teaching.

The recently added CVC decodable stories and activities are written with phonetically decodable text and a few high-frequency sight words, helping students to build key early reading skills. They are perfect for 1:1 reading sessions, but they also work well in a group or as a whole class activity.

Clicker Books

As reading is vital for students to fully access the curriculum, making sure early learners are secure in their knowledge of phonics is one of the key priority areas. Reading books that are decodable for a student and pitched at their stage of learning is important for building confidence.

Use the Read a Book version of the stories for added speech support. The Read It Yourself version is designed to encourage students to have a try at decoding and reading the text for themselves, so it's ideal when children are feeling more confident with the phonemes and graphemes at their level.

Matching Sets

Another way I always recommend using Matching Sets is to support your phonics teaching. 

In my teaching days, I loved simple phonics activities and games that my class could access independently. Matching Sets are an excellent resource for students developing blending, segmenting, and grapheme-phoneme correspondence skills. They are a valuable tool for supporting early reading to help students develop their decoding skills and ability to sound out words.

Using expression as early readers

From my experience teaching 1st grade, I know that teaching expression and intonation in reading can be challenging. Though students are learning many new skills, developing expression is key to building comprehension and a love of reading.  

Adding our recording tool into a Clicker Book is a great way to support students with this. 

Clicker Books

You can edit Clicker Books to include an audio recording of students reading the text aloud. They can listen back to this to: 

• Hear the story read in their own words 
  
  
• Listen out for how they've used expression
  
  
• Check if they've paid attention to punctuation
  
  
• See if their sentences make sense 

You could also record adults reading the text aloud using these recording tools and ask the students to play teacher! If an adult purposely reads with little expression or poor punctuation, students can listen for ways to improve and give feedback - simple but effective way for students to demonstrate their understanding of these skills, without even realizing it! 

Early reading comprehension and understanding

It's great when a student can read a word, a full sentence, or even a whole book but how can we ensure they've actually understood what they've read?

Comprehension skills are a vital part of early reading, and Clicker has a few ways to help!

Reading into writing

One of the things I love about using Clicker Books from LearningGrids is the corresponding writing activities. Writing grids vary in scaffolding and help students write about the book they've read. This is perfect for helping them to consolidate the text and show their understanding.

Speaking and listening

Talk Sets are another fantastic way to gauge a student's understanding of a text. They allow children to verbally share what they've read and are especially useful for students who struggle to express themselves in written form. They can record their thoughts about different parts of the text, describe characters or settings, retell a story, and so much more!

Conclusion

Clicker offers a wide range of resources that can support early reading skills, from pre-reading skills such as exploring new vocabulary, to post-reading comprehension activities.

By incorporating Clicker's interactive activities into your lessons, students are provided with valuable opportunities to practice and consolidate a range of key reading skills, allowing them to gain confidence in accessing content across the curriculum.

This is just a small snippet of how Clicker can help with early reading skills. Here are some other resources you might find helpful: 

The science of reading and Clicker's decodable books

Decodable stories - Clicker's CVC early reading resources

Using Clicker with traditional stories

Early elementary writing sequence

Before working at Crick, I taught across Early Years and Year 1 (the UK equivalent to early elementary) for 10 years, so I am always keen to use this experience to provide support and inspiration for how Clicker can be used in the Early Years classroom!

While teaching in those early classrooms, I learned that students need the chance to prepare and practice specific skills ahead of writing. For me, it often looked like this:

1. Pre-teaching vocabulary
2. Introducing a text
3. Retelling a story
4. Developing ideas
5. Sentence construction

When planning a writing sequence, I was always on the lookout for resources and activities that encouraged student 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 writers.

Pre-teaching vocabulary 

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 

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 when it comes to writing.

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 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 as a continuous provision activity 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 students.

Early elementary writing genres

 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 in my kindergarten classroom. 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.

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 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. Here are some other resources you might find helpful:

• Watch the Supporting writing in Early Years webinar
• Support early reading with Clicker blog post
• Clicker and Phonics webinar

Recently, more schools have requested online training for using Clicker with younger learners, especially emergent readers.

As a former early elementary teacher, I use my experience in these sessions to showcase how many of Clicker’s key features are beneficial for these students. 

Here are the four key elements of teaching early reading that I would focus on supporting with Clicker: 

1. Exploring vocabulary 
2. Decoding 
3. Using expression 
4. Comprehension and understanding

1) Exploring vocabulary

Matching Sets

I am a huge advocate of using Matching Sets to support with those vital early reading skills. They are a flexible resource and intuitive for students to use independently. They also make a great teaching tool on your interactive whiteboard! Matching Sets enable children to match words, pictures, and sounds to rehearse and consolidate new vocabulary.

I would often pre-teach vocabulary ahead of a new topic or text, and Matching Sets are a fantastic way to do this. In my experience, letting children explore new words and connect them to their sounds and images helps them read more confidently on their own. 

Teaching vocabulary is crucial for early reading, so LearningGrids offers numerous ready-made Matching Sets on various topics. 

2) Decoding

Having taught younger learners, I know how important phonics activities are to help students build confidence in decoding new words.

Our fantastic phonics resources on LearningGrids are easy to build into your planning to support your phonics teaching.

Decodable stories

The Tig in Mud Clicker Books are based on CVC decodable text, helping children to build key early reading skills. These books can include speech support, providing extra support for children to listen to the text read aloud. They are perfect for 1:1 reading sessions, but they also work as a group read or as a whole-class activity.

Matching Sets

Another way I always recommend using Matching Sets is to support your phonics teaching. 

In my teaching days, I loved simple phonics activities and games that my class could access independently. Matching Sets are an excellent resource for students developing blending, segmenting, and grapheme-phoneme correspondence skills. They are a valuable tool for supporting early reading to help children develop their decoding skills and ability to sound out words.

3) Using expression

From my experience teaching first grade, I know that teaching expression and intonation in reading can be challenging. Though students are learning many new skills, developing expression is key to building comprehension and a love of reading.  

Adding a record button in a Clicker Book is a great way to support children with this. 

Clicker Books

You can edit Clicker Books to include an audio recording of students reading the text aloud. They can listen back to this to:

• Hear the story read in their own words
• Listen out for how they’ve used expression
• Check if they’ve paid attention to punctuation 
• See if their sentences make sense 

You could also record adults reading the text aloud using the record button and ask the students to “play teacher”! If an adult purposely reads with little expression or poor punctuation, children can listen for ways to improve and give feedback. This is a simple but effective way for students to be demonstrating their understanding of these skills, without even realizing! 

4) Check comprehension and understanding

It’s great when a student can read a word, a full sentence, or even a whole book – but how can we ensure they’ve actually understood what they’ve read?

Comprehension skills are a vital part of early reading, and Clicker has a few ways to help!

Reading into writing

One of the things I love about using Clicker Books from LearningGrids is the corresponding writing activities. Writing grids vary in scaffolding and help students write about the book they’ve read. This is perfect for helping them to consolidate the text and show their understanding.  

Talk Sets

Talk Sets are another fantastic way to gauge a student’s understanding of a text. They allow children to verbally share what they’ve read and are especially useful for students who struggle to express themselves in written form. They can record their thoughts about different parts of the text, describe characters or settings, retell a story, and so much more! 

This is just a small snippet of how Clicker can help with early reading skills. Here are some other resources you might find helpful:

• Sounds & Letters LearningGrids resources
• Story Corner reading resources 
• Clicker for whole class teaching blog post

We spoke with Sophie, an elementary school teacher who was using Clicker to support her students with nonfiction writing. Sophie showed us how she used Clicker’s ready-made writing grids to help her class with instruction writing. Sophie was amazed by how Clicker supported low attainers in her class while extending high attainers and allowed all her students to be more independent with their writing. Check out this success story to read about the instruction writing her class produced!

LearningGrids has a range of resources available to support students with a variety of nonfiction writing. Let’s explore how we could use these ready-made resources to plan a sequence of lessons linked to writing a recount. 

First, this Recount Planner is a great resource for preparing and planning a piece of recount writing. Students can add in key information to create a plan, and then refer to it when writing their final piece. This is a flexible resource and could be used as a whole class planning tool by displaying the Board on your interactive whiteboard, or children could access it in groups or individually. From my teaching experience, I know having a good plan really influences the quality of a final piece of writing!

Next, this Connect Set is great for developing writers and allows them to take steps towards creating a piece of nonfiction writing independently. This writing grid offers useful vocabulary and phrases to help children to organize their writing and includes time connectives to support students with creating a cohesive recount. When the sentence is finished with a period, Clicker will read the sentence back - this is a great tool for encouraging children to proofread their own work. Sophie noted that, with this speech feedback, her students were picking up on errors they would not have ordinarily recognized!

Finally, for your more independent writers, this Word Bank contains starters and useful vocabulary to support your students with writing a simple recount. They can click or tap the words to add them to the Document and use Clicker’s built-in speech support to hear any of the words or phrases read aloud. Sophie commented that having these banks of vocabulary and visual prompts really encouraged her students to extend their writing!

This is just a sample of the nonfiction resources available; you can find a range of different Clicker Sets to support your students on LearningGrids. There are resources to support with letter writing, advertisements, discussion planners, and more!

I recently ran a webinar on using Clicker as part of your whole class teaching. Clicker is an invaluable support tool, but we recognize that not all schools have the licenses or devices for every student to access Clicker in every lesson. 

As a former teacher, I know that it can be tricky to use technology in your lessons in the way you would like to. In my most recent school, we shared 15 iPads with 90 students across the grade level, so it was always a case of checking if the iPads were available, going on a hunt to find the iPads, and ensuring all the iPads were fully charged before we could think about using them. 

So, I wanted to explore the ways that you can still get the most out of your Clicker subscription by using it as a teaching tool on your interactive whiteboard. 

Introducing topics

We started by looking at how you can use Clicker Books to introduce new topics to the class. Clicker Books are on-screen, speech-supported books which are perfect for using across a range of curriculum areas.

During the webinar we focused on the ready-made activities from LearningGrids and used the Savanna Animals resources as an example. In my experience, using a book as a hook into a new theme or topic is always an effective way to gather valuable information on what students already know, explore what they would like to find out, and begin introducing new concepts and vocabulary. 

We looked at how the Read a Book style of Clicker Book are full of text and pictures and are ideal to display on your interactive whiteboard for whole class teaching. We also explored how the Read It Yourself books work perfectly as a follow up activity or for your more emergent readers. 

One of the lovely things about Clicker Books is that they come with other linked Clicker Sets that are fantastic for using as a follow up activity, allowing you to keep consistency with the vocabulary and images explored in the book. 

For example, as a whole class follow up to the Animals of the Savanna book, we looked at how you might use the related Matching Set as a fun consolidation activity in a later lesson. Matching Sets are great for working on vocabulary and perfect for using on your interactive whiteboard! We talked about ways you might use this, for example as a lesson starter or wrap-up or as a group quiz with students writing answers on whiteboards – they are a really flexible resource you can build into your lesson planning in a way that suits the needs of your learners! 

Alternatively, Clicker Sets are printable so you could choose to print a physical copy of these for students to access as a matching activity within a lesson or laminate them so you can use them multiple times!

Gathering ideas for writing

Next, we looked at how you can use Clicker Boards to collate students’ ideas and thoughts ahead of a piece of writing. Clicker Boards are an easy-to-use mind mapping tool - they are a versatile tool, so we explored just a few of the ways you might use them in class. 

The Writing Frames and Planners section in LearningGrids is fantastic for a range of cross-curricular writing. These boards allow you to produce a plan together as a class that can be used to model a piece of writing, enabling you to have useful discussions ahead of students tackling the writing process independently.

There are a range of nonfiction planners available, too, including recounts, discussions, advertisements, and more. 

Then, we delved into how you can gather ideas and vocabulary for a piece of creative writing. We used the story planner Clicker Board to look at how you can collect a range of vocabulary and customize the appearance of your board, so it suits the needs of your learners. With a Clicker Board displayed on your interactive whiteboard, students can offer their ideas while you quickly type them in and build up the mind map. 

I was forever creating mind maps when I was teaching, but these would often end up as frantically scrawled diagrams on a piece of flipchart paper, that would end up stuck on a cupboard door. With Clicker Boards, you can tailor the appearance and quickly add in picture support too - great for printing out for a working wall or to stick in students’ notebooks!

Modeled writing

One of my favorite features of Clicker Boards is that they can quickly and easily be turned into a Word Bank, allowing you to transition seamlessly from the planning process to the writing process. With the Word Bank displayed on your interactive whiteboard, you can use Clicker’s word processor to model the writing process while having quick access to all the key vocabulary needed for your piece of writing. This is a fantastic way for you to talk about sentence structure, language choices, and punctuation before the students begin their own writing. 

Then, depending on what technology you have available during that lesson, some students may go on to produce a piece of writing using Clicker on a device, some may be independently writing in their notebooks, or some may be using a printed Word Bank to support them with spelling and vocabulary in their writing. 

This is just a few examples of how you might use Clicker as part of your whole class teaching! If you would like more information, you can:

• Visit our training hub
  
  
• Schedule a customer care meeting
  
  
• Explore LearningGrids for resources relevant to your learners

We have recently added to our DocsPlus training resources, which now include tutorials on saving, sharing and printing documents and Smart Tabs. 

We know that these are fundamental in using the software successfully – for both your staff and students – so these tutorials cover all devices (PC, Chromebooks and iPads) and are broken down into simple steps for everyone to follow.  

If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can use the menu to the right of the screen to jump to the tutorial you need. Otherwise, you can watch the tutorials through in full for a start-to-finish guide on saving, sharing and printing in DocsPlus. 

If you need any extra help at any point, our support team is always happy to help. You can reach us by email at info@cricksoft.com, or by completing this short form.

Recently, we spoke with a school who have successfully used Clicker to transform a student’s negative relationship with writing and improved their outlook and pride in their written work.

This student particularly benefited from using tailor-made Word Banks, filled with targeted vocabulary to support her writing. The staff decided to create Word Banks for this learner with some sentence openers and adjective and verb suggestions to help her structure a cohesive piece of writing. The Word Bank also included the student’s targeted spelling words so she could access them independently in the lesson, using Clicker’s speech feedback to hear them read aloud.

Watch the video below to find out how you can create your own personalized word banks to support your learners.

Read the Magill School success story to find out more about how they use Clicker to support their students.

Watch our tutorials to learn how to create and edit more Clicker resources.

Recently, we spoke with a teacher who said that one of their favourite features of Clicker is that you can quickly turn a Clicker Board into a Word Bank!

Students can contribute their ideas to a whole-class discussion on a topic, and the teacher can collate the ideas using Clicker Board on the whiteboard. The Board can then be turned into a Word Bank and shared with students to use to support their independent writing.

This allows students to transition seamlessly from planning a piece of writing to producing their writing using a wide range of vocabulary.

With this vocabulary available in a Word Bank, learners can easily add words to a piece of writing and use Clicker’s built-in speech support to hear any words read aloud. They will also have access to all of Clicker’s support tools throughout their writing.

Clicker is a flexible tool, so you can create mind maps related to anything that suits the needs of your learners. For example, you may wish to collate sentence starters, character descriptions, or key vocabulary linked to a topic you are studying in class.

Watch our video to find out how you can turn your Clicker Board into a Word Bank!

There are hundreds of ready-made Clicker Boards available on LearningGrids, or you can create your own!

Picture the scene: It’s 1:45pm and your first grade class have just listened eagerly to a science lesson all about the five senses. You’ve kept them captivated and are just setting them off to do some independent writing. Suddenly it’s 2pm - six children still haven’t found a pencil, four children have skipped three pages in their notebook, and a large percentage of your class have written a sentence that looks nothing like the work they produced in language arts that morning.

So, my question is, how can Clicker help some of our youngest writers to accurately portray their understanding in the core subjects? When I was teaching, I found that my first graders’ science notebooks were rarely a true representation of what they had learned or understood throughout the lesson, and I was always searching for ways to increase engagement and gather evidence of new learning in my classroom.

This is how I would use Clicker’s wide range of tools to ensure all students are able to show off their new-found knowledge in the core subjects. I am going to explore the Our Senses LearningGrids resources - ready-made resources that you can quickly and easily customize to suit the needs of your learners. This suggested sequence of activities can be used at the pace that suits your learners (and over a number of lessons depending on your daily schedule).

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Complete a pre-teaching activity using a Clicker Board to check students’ prior knowledge

The beauty of Clicker is that you can adapt it to match the needs of your class. Your Planning Board can be used with a whole class, in groups, or individually. This pre-teaching activity will give you a great insight into what your students already know. Why not repeat this activity at the end of the unit to see how far they’ve come?

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Read a Clicker Book

Once you’ve explored what students already know, use a Clicker Book about the senses to support your teaching. This could be done as a whole class activity during your teaching input or more independently as part of a guided reading session. You can choose to have students read the book themselves or listen to the text read aloud.

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Check students’ understanding through Matching Sets

Time to let your class show off what they are learning! With this Matching Set, students can show their understanding of the five senses while also having some fun. They listen to statements about sense organs and choose the picture that best fits the information. On each page, students need to simply click on the speaker button to listen and then choose the matching picture.

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Oral recording of their new knowledge using Talk Sets

Next, get students talking about what they have learned. In this Talk About activity, learners record information about the five senses. There are Talk Sets linked to each of the senses. You could split your class into five groups and have each group plan out and record ideas for a different sense. You could then have a listening party where you share and celebrate each other’s work.

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Write simple sentences using a Connect Set

After students have orally rehearsed their ideas in the previous lesson, set them the task of using a Connect Set to write simple sentences about each of the five senses by matching sentence beginning and endings. This is a great way for students to practice sentences about what they have learned before moving on to the grand finale…

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…Make a book!

Now that your students are experts on all things senses, they could make their own Clicker Book. This resource includes word and picture banks to support students in being as independent as possible. The book is something students could create individually, in pairs, or in groups. Students will love being a nonfiction author, and you can quickly see who has grasped the new learning and find out where any gaps in learning are.

So now, it’s the end of your senses topic and your class are proudly reading each other their Clicker Books, full of knowledge and relevant vocabulary. All students have been able to access the activities, and without a single child looking for a pencil!

The features I’ve mentioned here are just a small sample of the many easy-to-use tools and resources available on LearningGrids to support students with their cross-curricular writing.

We’re excited to share that our new training resources - tutorials on saving, sharing, and printing Clicker files – are now live on our website!

These tutorials are full of useful information to support you with saving, sharing, and printing on all devices - PC, Chromebooks, and iPads. 

You can either watch a full tutorial, or quickly jump to the information that you need using the menu to the right of the screen. Each video comes with a handy printable summary so you can print the step-by-step instructions and keep them to hand.

These tutorials are great for showing you how you can use your school’s normal saving, sharing and printing practices with Clicker files!

Saving

These tutorials guide you through how to save Clicker Documents and Clicker Sets on different devices and to different locations. Find out how to save your Clicker files in line with your school’s established saving systems.

There’s also a ‘top tips’ section where we delve into how to navigate and customize your file explorer, and how to save your Clicker files as an alternative file type. For example, saving your work as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF so that you can open it on a device that doesn’t have Clicker installed.

Sharing

We understand how important it is to be able to share files quickly and easily, from sharing files with colleagues, sharing a resource to a different device, or sharing work with parents and carers. We also understand that the number of ways you can share files can be overwhelming, particularly if it involves devices from other platforms!

So, the new tutorials guide you through different ways to share your Clicker files, providing clear explanations of which file sharing methods are available on your device, and the steps required to utilise them. Learn about how to share Clicker files, and how to open Clicker files that have been shared with you.

The tutorials include useful information on sharing Clicker files via email, cloud storage, network sharing, and sharing through AirDrop, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams.

Printing

Whether you’re printing work to keep a physical record of learners’ progress or printing Clicker Sets to share with students and staff – these tutorials will have the information you need! They include extra information on how to add headers and footers, how to save on ink by turning off backgrounds, and how to print your Analytics information.

Our Support team is always happy to help if you have any technical questions or difficulties getting set up with our software. You can reach us by email at support@cricksoft.com, by phone at 01604 671691 or by completing this short form.

Recently, we have been speaking with schools to find out how they are using Clicker in a school-wide approach to learning support.

One school explained that they use Clicker in upper elementary classrooms to consolidate word classifications. Educators take Word Banks and color code them to match the school’s system. For example, creating a Word Bank with a yellow tab for nouns, a blue tab for verbs and an orange tab for adjectives.

There are hundreds of ready-made Word Banks available on LearningGrids, linked to a wide range of curriculum areas, and it is quick and easy to edit them to add your own color coding! In edit view, you can change the color of your grids or individual words by clicking or tapping the color palette.

Clicker is a flexible tool that allows you to add or remove this type of scaffolding depending on the needs of your learners. You can quickly remove this color coding for your older learners, so you can identify how well the children’s understanding of word classification has progressed.

Watch our tutorial to find out how to edit a Word Bank from LearningGrids, or how to quickly create your own from scratch!

For information on how to use Clicker to support Colourful Semantics, watch our on-demand webinar or check out the resources on LearningGrids!

Recently, we ran a training webinar focusing on how Clicker can be used in the Early Years.

We had lots of interest in different literacy topics, including vocabulary building activities, speaking and listening activities, and sentence building. As a former teacher, it was great to see how many resources there are available within LearningGrids that can be used in an Early Years setting! We explored Little Red Riding Hood as an example, but there are thousands more ready-made resources, linked to many other stories, themes and topics.

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Vocabulary building

For vocabulary building, we started by looking at the Look and Read Matching Set. This resource is a great way to introduce learners to the key language they are likely to encounter in the story. Children can rehearse vocabulary by matching an image from the story to the corresponding word. This is a brilliant activity for children to complete independently after a teaching input, it’s such an engaging way for them to consolidate new learning!

Next, we looked at Clicker Books. These on-screen, speech supported books empower students of all abilities to read more independently. We began by exploring the Little Red Riding Hood Read a Book, which provides a more detailed version of the story combining images and text to engage your learners. To make this activity more accessible, children also have the option to hear the story read aloud.

We then looked at the Read it Yourself book. These books are designed for children to read the text themselves, using a simplified version of the story to encourage independence when reading. For additional support, this resource can be edited to include a read button so children can use Clicker to read the story to them. I always enjoyed nurturing a love of reading in my classroom, and Clicker Books are a great way of encouraging this! They make reading fun for your learners and allow them to access a range of books independently.

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Speaking and listening

Next, we looked at how Clicker can be used to develop speaking and listening skills. We began by looking at the Little Red Riding Hood Keywords activity. Children can listen to core vocabulary from the story and record themselves saying these words aloud.

Once learners are familiar with the key vocabulary and plot of the story, they can use this Tell the Story Talk Set to orally retell Little Red Riding Hood. This resource includes images from the story in sequence, learners simply click a picture and record their ideas using the microphone button.  When finished, children can listen to all the recordings to hear the story retold in their own words. This resource can be completed individually, in groups, or as a whole class!

Finally, we explored Clicker Boards. With this Describe the Characters activity, children can create profile mind maps of characters from the story. Children can type key descriptive words into text boxes and further expand on their ideas by recording a voice note. I would have enjoyed using this as a whole class activity with my Reception class, the children can contribute ideas whilst the teacher collates them on the whiteboard. This board can then be turned into a word bank to support learners further with their writing!

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Sentence Building

For sentence building skills, we began by looking at the Clicker Sets available to support children of all writing abilities. First, we looked at this Sentence Set, which helps children to build a simple sentence word by word. This resource provides children with all the words needed to build their first sentence, with the words displayed in a random order. Learners click each word to bring it into the document and build their sentence whilst developing their understanding of sentence structure and word order.

If children come to a word or phrase they cannot decode, they can use the speech feedback to hear it read aloud. Once the sentence is finished and a period is added in, Clicker reads the sentence back to the children so they can listen out for any errors. For additional support when using the Sentence Set, children can look at the complete sentence to understand the correct sentence structure before having another go.

Next we explored a Connect Set to support children with retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood. This resource provides children with a scaffold to support the writing process and encourages them to independently experiment with a wider choice of vocabulary and sentence structures. This activity contains images from the story, so learners can choose when and how they want to illustrate their writing.

It was fantastic to be able to share these ideas with so many of our customers. If you’d like more information on how you can use Clicker to support your learners in Early Years, you can:

• Watch our tutorials or book a meeting
• Explore LearningGrids for resources on nursery rhymes, sentence patterns, positional language and thousands more!