Clicker®

Judith Evans
Park End Primary School Middlesbrough

I teach in a year-one class of 26 children.  At the beginning of the year about 40% were on the SEN register and therefore needed a lot of support, particularly with reading and writing.  I was introduced to the new Clicker 5 program and immediately saw its potential for both the SEN children and the whole class.

Clicker 5 has been used with all the children in the class, at an appropriate differentiated level.  As the children progressed I was able to move away from using the more structured grids and also had a go at creating some of my own.  The more able children are now encouraged to write independently using the keyboard, using the word banks and pictures as needed, whilst others use the grids with word and/or picture support. 

We have used Clicker across lots of curriculum areas.  For example in guided reading sessions, for simple sentence construction, topic word banks and even to create our own books about our school trips!  When we start a topic, I tend to look at the LearningGrids site to get ideas, I download those grids that we can make use of and adapt them if necessary.  It is just so much easier to start with something that is already there and just adapt it to my needs. 

"The children were all able to
write an email about themselves..."We recently did a geography topic on Barnaby Bear in Australia.  As I have friends out there, I asked them to email my class. Then I used a grid from the examples which come with Clicker 5 and edited it to incorporate information about ourselves and England e.g. My name is, I live in, I like to, At school I and At home I, In my garden etc so that the children could use the word bank to write a piece of writing about themselves that could be emailed back to Australia. The children were all able to write an email about themselves therefore giving a real purpose for writing.  As the children were able to incorporate pictures into their work it increased the level of motivation particularly amongst a few boys with behaviour problems.

We are about to start a topic on castles and will be using the Find Out and Write About Castles resource.  We really like these resources as there is so much information on these CDs which means we can use it as a whole-class teaching tool.  Then the children can all use it at the appropriate level on one of the three networked computers in our classroom.  They are so motivating and because there is speech feedback at every level, all of our children can make use of them.

As Clicker is so easy to set up, it means that I can concentrate on the learning outcome and not just creating resources.  I do make use of the free resources on LearningGrids and adapt them to my own requirements. This also ensures that we are able to provide appropriate support for all of the children in the class, whatever their ability level.

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