Rachel Plant

I have created Clicker Grids to work alongside the Early Literacy Support Programme which is an age-related catch-up programme for year 1 and year 2 children.  As part of an action research project through a course I am currently undertaking, I tested the children’s progress during the twelve-week program and we have been very excited by the results.  Children have progressed between 2 and 5 sub-levels whilst involved in the programme.

We have used Clicker for CVC word matching as well as to create talking books using familiar pictures and vocabulary.  It has really been an invaluable tool for scaffolding the children’s writing both on the computer and for paper-based extension activities.  We have created sentence-building grids which the children can use in the computer suite. We have also printed these colour-coded grids on our colour printer and have cut up the words and phrases to enable the children to extend the work away from the computer.

We love the fact that Clicker is so versatile and colourful which helps us to support our children.  It is great for the children’s self-esteem as they can hear before they write into the Clicker Grid.  They can also make mistakes and easily take it back which gives them the confidence to try different alternatives.

The test results are so encouraging we are about to show our Teaching Assistants how to use the programme in their interventions.  We also plan to use Clicker to support all of our children for whole-class teaching.