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:

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.