We spoke with Sophie, an elementary school teacher who was using Clicker to support her students with nonfiction writing. Sophie showed us how she used Clicker’s ready-made writing grids to help her class with instruction writing. Sophie was amazed by how Clicker supported low attainers in her class while extending high attainers and allowed all her students to be more independent with their writing. Check out this success story to read about the instruction writing her class produced!
LearningGrids has a range of resources available to support students with a variety of nonfiction writing. Let’s explore how we could use these ready-made resources to plan a sequence of lessons linked to writing a recount.
First, this Recount Planner is a great resource for preparing and planning a piece of recount writing. Students can add in key information to create a plan, and then refer to it when writing their final piece. This is a flexible resource and could be used as a whole class planning tool by displaying the Clicker Board on your interactive whiteboard, or children could access it in groups or individually. From my teaching experience, I know having a good plan really influences the quality of a final piece of writing!
Next, this Connect Set is great for developing writers and allows them to take steps towards creating a piece of nonfiction writing independently. This writing grid offers useful vocabulary and phrases to help children to organize their writing and includes time connectives to support students with creating a cohesive recount. When the sentence is finished with a period, Clicker will read the sentence back - this is a great tool for encouraging children to proofread their own work. Sophie noted that, with this speech feedback, her students were picking up on errors they would not have ordinarily recognized!
Finally, for your more independent writers, this Word Bank contains starters and useful vocabulary to support your students with writing a simple recount. They can click or tap the words to add them to the Document and use Clicker’s built-in speech support to hear any of the words or phrases read aloud. Sophie commented that having these banks of vocabulary and visual prompts really encouraged her students to extend their writing!
This is just a sample of the nonfiction resources available; you can find a range of different Clicker Sets to support your students on LearningGrids. There are resources to support letter writing, creating advertisements, planning discussions, and more!
