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.