Colourful Semantics

What is Colourful Semantics?

Hypotheses - 3  

If I use the Colourful Semantics program to motivate students, will this then help them to form a sentence independently.

My students struggled to understand the parts of a sentence. I began teaching what WHO, DOING WHAT , WHERE means using The Colourful Semantics programme. We worked on many examples.
I began to use this program when one of my emergent students was really struggling to construct a simple sentence. He wasn’t able to recall events from the weekend, had no idea of subject and verb. This program uses visual supports which helped the student. I spent a few weeks teaching what WHO, DOING WHAT MEANS. 

Colourful semantics is an approach created by Alison Bryan. It is aimed at helping children to develop their grammar but it is rooted in the meaning of words (semantics).

Colourful semantics reassembles sentences by cutting them up into their thematic roles and then colour codes them.

The approach has 4 key colour coded stages. There are further stages for adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions and negatives.

1.     WHO – Orange

2.     WHAT DOING – Yellow

3.     WHAT – Green

4.     WHERE – Blue

The approach helps children to organise their sentences into key levels. The approach is used in stages and helps children develop language and vocabulary in addition to grammatical structure. It can be used to help children who are starting to develop language and have limited vocabulary to confident talkers who struggle to organise the grammatical content of their sentences.

Who can use Colourful Semantics?

The approach can be used with children with a range of Speech, Language and Communication Needs including:

·       Specific Language Impairment

·       Developmental Delay or Disorder

·       Autistic Spectrum Condition

·       Down Syndrome

·       Literacy difficulties

Why use Colourful Semantics?

There are a range of benefits to using this approach, including but not limited to;

·       Encouraging wider vocabulary

·       Making sentences longer

·       Helps children to answer questions or generate responses to questions

·       Developing use of nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives

·       Improves story telling skills

·       Can be transferred to written sentences and written language comprehension

·       Can be carried out individually or in small groups

After explicitly teaching my student to use this program, the next few examples are of students at different levels

This is one of my student's work sample using Colourful semantics, just with visuals

In this example, the student isn't writing independently, so  I wrote what the student said and modeled what needed to be done. 

This student is writing with support. Using colorful semantics to help her construct her sentence,this is what she wrote. 

All three examples show students using Colourful Semantics, but at their individual level.

Will this work for my other students?