After their training session, a school reached out for further support on how to guide their students through Clicker’s Writing Grids to encourage independent writing.
Writing Grids are available in Clicker and have been designed to provide writing-specific support for learners of all abilities.
The school could clearly see what a fantastic tool Clicker is, so their teachers wanted more guidance on how to use the different types of Writing Grids to help students progress from emergent and developing writers into independent writers.
They had the initial idea of a flowchart which could be used by staff to understand how to move students through the Writing Grids, clearly demonstrating how learners can progress through various stages of scaffolding. Using this idea, I created a flowchart that guides teachers through which Writing Grid to use and when.
1. Sentence Sets are simple sentence building activities, working on constructing a specific sentence word by word. Sentence Sets are perfect for a student who needs support writing simple sentences with correct word order and punctuation.
2. The student may then move onto Connect Sets which are going to support your developing writers, providing clusters of words to help them build a coherent piece of text. It is still scaffolded writing but gives a greater choice of words.
3. Finally, Word Banks are for more independent writers who can form sentences but need vocabulary support. Word banks give students access to correctly spelled subject-specific vocabulary and provide support when using new vocabulary or difficult words. Word banks can be organized into topic tabs to help structure a piece of writing or arranged alphabetically to support spelling.
To use the flowchart in your school, download it here.
Clicker’s intuitive word processor, including Spell Check, Predictor, and Voice Notes, can be used alongside Clicker’s Writing Grids to transform a student’s daily writing challenges into achievable targets.
To view our bank of ready-made Writing Grids, visit LearningGrids. If you would like to edit or create your own Writing Grids, watch our tutorials.
If you have any questions, contact our Customer Experience team by phone at 203 221 2697 or by email at training@cricksoft.com.
