A Reading Programme for Children with Autism, Speech and Language Impairments and Down syndrome
Clicker 5 Reading and Writing Program
The Clicker 5 Reading and Writing Program is used in 90% of all UK primary schools. Between 1995 and 2007 it won six prestigious BETT Awards for Special Needs (the equivalent of ‘the Oscars’ for educational software), including three Special Needs Gold Awards.
The great news for parents is that there is now a home version available “Clicker for Home” which has all the functionality of the school version but is supplied to parents at a very reasonable price. With over 600 free downloadable exercises, developed by teachers, and 2,000 curriculum related pictures, parents can use the program to directly teach reading and writing skills. Even better it can be used to work with the school to revise and consolidate the school work, as it is very easy for the school to give the exercises to the parent for use at home.
All our CD-ROM’s contain the POPS characters (including cats and dogs) for use with Clicker 5. We supply two complete sets, a head and shoulder set for the talking word processor and a full body set for book building and talking books. They are beautifully made and very colourful.
Some of the key features of Clicker 5 are:
- Each sentence can be automatically read out as it is completed, with every word clearly highlighted, as it is spoken, enabling learners to follow the text and review what they have written.
- Choose different voices (man or woman) and control the speed at which the person speaks
- Lots of templates are provided to easily and quickly create a variety of printed and talking books.
- Easy to use ‘drag-and-drop’ facility to add your own pictures and photos.
Clicker Paint
Clicker Paint is sold as an additional programme for schools but is included in the Clicker 5 program for parents. It is a child-friendly, powerful painting tool, so the child can paint a picture to accompany their words or to illustrate their story. If a child or even the parent is not overly fond of drawing pictures, they will be very pleased with the easy stamping tool that allows them to easily add an existing picture or photo to the exercise.
Clicker Sounds and Letters Phonic Program
Ideally, when teaching your child phonics you need a simple PC program that clearly teaches all the letter and letter combination sounds using pictures and plenty of repetition. It is very helpful if the child, teacher and parent can easily record and play back their efforts at making the sounds, making it fun and often prolonging the time the child is willing to devote to the task.
This follows the POPS philosophy of making the task engaging and fun for the child. The Sounds and Letters Phonic Program with Clicker 5 delivers just that. Because it is sold as an add-on to Clicker 5, it is very affordable for both the school and the parent.
More importantly, it can easily be customised, like all Clicker 5 exercises, so you can remove or modify any barriers stopping your child making progress. For example when teaching the letter sound “a”, if you though a word used like “ambulance” is too difficult for your child, you just go into edit mode and change both the picture and word to some thing easier like “ape”.
Especially useful for parents, is the handy and invaluable phonics dictionary with all the 42 sounds, giving examples of their usage and allowing you to practice making the sounds correctly.
The exercises introduce each letter sound and shape, and children gain synthetic phonic skills by blending sounds to build words. The phonemes (sounds of letters and letter combinations) are presented in groups to enable the teacher to introduce them in structured daily phonics sessions.
The First steps – Listen and First steps – Say activities enable children to practise oral blending and segmenting of sounds in spoken words before they are introduced to corresponding graphemes.
Sounds and Letters mark the start of systematic phonic work. It introduces the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences and allows children to learn and apply the skills of blending phonemes through a word to read it, and of segmenting a word into constituent phonemes to spell it.
The CD presents activities within accumulative letter groups. This means that children can move incrementally from simple to more complex phonic work and teachers can introduce the phonemes in discrete daily phonics sessions.
Children engage in a wide range of activities in which they learn, use and apply phonic knowledge and skills. They learn new letters and sounds, then practise grapheme-phoneme correspondences, decoding for reading and encoding for spelling. Many activities offer assessment opportunities so a teacher can track a child’s progress both within and across the groups.
It is taught in seven letter groups. These groups focus on the following phonemes/graphemes:
| Group | Phonemes/Graphemes |
| 1 | s, a, t, p, i, n |
| 2 | c, k, e, h, r, m, d |
| 3 | g, o, u, l, f, b |
| 4 | ai, j, oa, ie, ee, or |
| 5 | z, w, ng, v, oo, oo |
| 6 | y, x, ch, sh, th, th |
| 7 | qu, ou, oi ,ue, er, ar, ear, air |
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