 Clicker®
Case Studies
Kim Connor
St John the Evangelist RC Primary School London
Within our school all the teachers and teaching assistants have Clicker 5 on their laptops. They use this excellent programme with small groups of pupils and with the whole class through the interactive whiteboard.
I have developed the use of Clicker within our ICT suite as a Wave 3 intervention programme to develop spelling skills. We have named it “Clicker Club”.
"...pupils come along to Clicker Club..."Clicker Club targets pupils from Years 4, 5 and 6 who are struggling with spelling due to dyslexia or other literacy difficulties. Small groups of pupils come along to Clicker Club in the ICT suite for two fifteen-minute sessions per week, and use the Clicker program to type up sentences they have made up. These sentences include target words that each pupil is learning to spell (usually two target words per sentence).
Each pupil works on 2-4 sentences and about 6-8 target words per session. The pupil has to remember the sentence, type it up and make any corrections. After this the pupil listens to Clicker read the sentence out loud. Finally the child self-assesses his/her work using a marking system that the pupils have devised. (One tick for a sentence that needs correcting after being read out and two for a sentence that is correct when read out.)
"Clicker Club helps to link up the child’s learning"The emphasis is on using both routes into reading – the sounds in the word and the look of the word. The pupils gain confidence through this regular, short, focused practice. There are lots of opportunities for over-learning and most importantly the experience of making mistakes and learning how to put them right. This allows the pupils to develop the ability to correct and edit their own work and find ways to remember the spellings of key words.
In particular the children love to problem-solve. If, for example, a sentence is supposed to say, “On Friday I went to the park” but reads back as, “On Firday I went to the park”, the child has to really think about the sounds and work with them in order to correct any mistakes. These kinds of mistakes are often quite funny which aids the pupil’s memory of the spelling and encourages their enjoyment of the task. When a pupil has produced a sentence accurately a number of times (four/five) they then devise a new sentence using two or more fresh target words. These target words come from the pupil’s classroom work, for example, common spelling mistakes they make in their free writing. This way Clicker Club helps to link up the child’s learning and encourages him or her to employ the skills gained from working with Clicker in other situations within the classroom or at home.
"The pupils can see their skills
developing before their very eyes!"Teachers are reporting back that Clicker Club members are making great progress in their confidence to have a go, their knowledge of strategies to learn spellings and their awareness of how to go about editing their own written work. The pupils can see their skills developing before their very eyes! They can identify why a particular word was difficult for them in the past and why it is easy for them to remember now. One particular pupil could not spell one day of the week before he came to Clicker Club and now loves to use up any spare few minutes left in a session, typing out the whole sequence accurately and automatically and listening to the computer read out his success! The pupils alternate between working alone and in pairs, reading out each other’s sentences for the other pupil to type. This gives the pupils the opportunity to share ideas and talk about how Clicker helps them. One boy told the group that he remembers how to spell the word “day” by the position of the letters on the keyboard. So the pupils are finding out a lot about their own learning styles through their use of this program.
"...we have made a Clicker Club video"In order to share the children’s achievements we have made a Clicker Club video that we are currently planning to show to junior classes, teachers and parents. This will allow others to see what we do at Clicker Club and encourage the widespread use of this excellent resource. We will also be telling the infant classes about Clicker Club as we know the younger children have as much fun using Clicker as the older children do.
As well as being the Inclusion Coordinator at St John Evangelist School, I am also an Advisory Teacher for Literacy Difficulties for the borough. I have used Clicker Club to put into practice the multi-sensory spelling techniques that I promote as good inclusive practice. These techniques go hand in hand with the Clicker program. As a result I am finding myself recommending Clicker to more and more pupils, teachers and parents through the fun and success we are having at Clicker Club.
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