Providing students with plenty of valuable opportunities to write is a key element of early elementary teaching. Younger students benefit from having a combination of independent and adult-led activities to help them build on their early writing skills.

Often these activities are planned carefully, but great writing also frequently comes from skilled educators scaffolding a writing opportunity in the moment and creating an environment that fosters a love of writing.

Ensuring that these writing opportunities are engaging for students is vital – giving them chances to enjoy a range of writing styles, genres, and purposes. Some of my go-to early writing activities included:

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

Real life experiences

In my classroom, I often found that students were more confident when writing about their own experiences. For example, writing up their weekend news, a recount of a class trip or event, or describing a special occasion.

Clicker’s ready-made resources include a range of scaffolds to support students with writing about their weekend. With speech-supported vocabulary and prompts, children can add their ideas in independently.

Using the Voice Notes tool, students can also talk through their ideas before they start writing. This is perfect for those children who are more confident verbally - they can listen back to their recording as many times as they need throughout the writing process.

LearningGrids also has activities perfect for supporting students when writing about a class trip! In my teaching days, I took many trips to the local farm with children, and we would always do some writing when we got back to school.

The Farm collection in LearningGrids has a wide range of resources with different levels of support that you can use to encourage students to write about their field trip.  

Caption writing

I always found value in keeping some writing tasks short and snappy for early elementary writing. Having activities such as caption writing or labeling built into my planning really helped to develop students’ confidence with their independent writing.

Having a bank of these activities within continuous provision or set up as an independent challenge allowed them to consolidate the skills we’d been practicing as a class or in adult-led groups.

You can recreate simple caption writing in Clicker in a few different ways.  

Adding image support into a writing grid is a great way to provide scaffolding for those students who need a bit more support when writing their captions. They simply need to tap the words to bring them into the document and rebuild the sentence.

You can add your own images or pictures from the CrickPix2 library to any ready-made Clicker resources or any activities you’re making from scratch. This is quick and easy to do, whether you’re planning ahead or adding a picture to encourage some writing in the moment!

In Clicker (Win/Mac) you can insert images into the document in several ways as a prompt for students to write their caption. This also works really nicely as a modeling activity on your interactive whiteboard, encouraging discussion about sentence structure and language choices. Any opportunity to model and reinforce the use of finger spaces and punctuation in early writing is key!

You can use Clicker Books for caption writing too! The Make-a-Book resources allow you to add your own pictures and text to every page. These resources include Clicker’s built-in support tools so students can use the Predictor, spell check, and speech support to help them build their sentence.

Creative writing

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

The repetitive language in stories can often be comforting for children when writing, helping them to find confidence with writing their own story by introducing familiar characters and settings.

Clicker has a whole creative writing section on LearningGrids, as well as resources linked to traditional tales and other stories - perfect for early elementary writing.

These activities provide students with endless scaffolds to support them with writing!

Clicker Boards are perfect for planning a story, breaking it down into manageable steps that children can access in a way that suits their learning style best. Whether that’s single words, whole sentences, pictures, or audio. Students can access these on devices or simply print them to have a physical copy.

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

Having a writing grid available as a prompt (either on screen or printed!) can help to fuel students’ imagination for the plot of their story. This is just a small sample of the creative writing resources available in LearningGrids.

Conclusion

Clicker is for everyone! There are so many activities to support students with meeting their early elementary writing goals.

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

I had very limited access to technology in my previous kindergarten classrooms, but the activities I’ve shown throughout this blog post can all be utilized on an interactive whiteboard or printed to use as a physical activity.

This is just a small sample of ways that Clicker can be used in an early elementary classroom. You might find our recent post Early reading support with Clicker useful, too!