COLOURFUL SEMANTICS

Colourful semantics it is aimed at helping children to develop their grammar but it is routed in the
meaning of words (semantics).

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

This is a Speech and Language therapy technique which uses colour coded cards to help children
to learn the important elements of a sentence, and how to join them together in the correct order.

The approach has 4 key colour coded stages. There are further stages for adverbs, adjectives,
conjunctions and negatives.
Who? – Orange
What Doing? – Yellow
What? – Blue
Where? – Red
When? - Brown
Tell me more - White

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.

Those four are the main stages of Colourful Semantics, and as such the colour coding for them is
pretty consistent across all the resources (although occasionally I will see resources with whereas
red). After level 4 the sentences get long and the colour coding is less consistent across resources.

The colour scheme I have used is as follows:

Descriptives/Adjective – White
When/Time – Brown
Adverbs/How doing – Purple
To whom – Pink
Joining words/conjunctions – Grey
Not (e.g not running) – Red on white, no entry symbol
So a long sentence might be colour coded as follows:
Anna ate an apple and a sandwich at lunchtime.
Daniel played football with Aditya.

As I said above, the colour coding is not as universal past Level 4 but the most important thing
really is that it remains consistent for the individual you are working with.

Colourful Semantics can involve coloured text like I’ve shown above, or it can be pictures with text
onto a coloured background like the image at the top of the page. Many of the people I have
worked with have primarily worked with the latter – pictures and words – to help make the
concept more visual, but my colleagues have used coloured or highlighted text to the same effect
with other children, it depends upon the person using it.

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WHAT DO I NEED TO GET STARTED?
There are Colourful Semantic apps available for Android and the iPad which come with preinstalled
photographs and all the card selections you will need for each picture. Otherwise you can print
out, laminate and Velcro in the same way that you can with PECS.

For Colourful Semantics you will need a selection of pictures, you can find loads of photos on the
internet with Google search. You can either print these off or save them to a place where you can
load them up and use them later.

Then you need the individual colour coded cards (either words or words and symbols). So, if you
have a boy throwing a ball, you would want at least two cards for each element:
Who? Boy or Girl/Dog/Monkey/Winnie the Pooh/Mike the Knight
Doing? Throwing or Jumping/Sleeping/Sitting
What? Ball or Cat/Bottle/Jumper

Each card will be colour coded accordingly, printed, laminated and velcroid.

Then you will need a strip to attach the cards to, similar to the one at the top. That needs to be
printed, cut out, laminated and velcroid too.

Then that would be you ready to start.

SMALL GROUP ACTIVITY

Identify the key words in the following sentences:
- The boy kicked the ball at the park.
- The boy is tall.
- The boy quietly crept up behind the girl.
- The girl gave flowers to her mother.

WHAT IS COLOURFUL SEMANTICS?

• Colourful Semantics is a teaching strategy that uses colour-coded cue cards to ‘show’ how
a sentence is made up. Each colour card represents a word or part of the sentence.
• Colourful Semantics teaches key words and does not focus on syntax ie. determiners (eg.
the), plurality (eg. houses, mice), tense (eg. -ed, ing, will), or possessives (eg. her bike, the
boy’s kite) etc…

WHAT IS COLOURFUL SEMANTICS? (CONT)

All students can benefit from the use of Colourful Semantics as all students need to develop an
ability to think about sentences.
It is a strategy that can be used within existing classroom activities at a number of different levels:
Whole class;
Small group / Learning Centres;
1:1;
Specific Language Impairment;
Developmental Delay or Disorder;
Autistic Spectrum Condition;
Down Syndrome;
Literacy difficulties;
Children with a reduced vocabulary;
Children that struggle with word order;
Children learning English as a second language;

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 Visual learners.

WHY?
This intervention helps develop the child’s ability to write grammatically accurate sentences and
help them understand word order and categories in the English language.

COLOURFUL SEMANTICS ACTIVITIES AIM TO HELP CHILDREN TO:

Understand instructions and produce sentences;
Follow discussions and to communicate their own ideas effectively;
Develop competent use of simple and complex sentence structure;
Use different modalities to learn about making sentences (Children with SLD are usually
stronger visually and kinesthetically - hands-on);
Develop a concept of narrative (e.g. what makes up a ‘story’);
Produce grammatically correct sentences in speaking and writing (through modelling);
Reduce problem behaviours such as anger and aggression in the classroom (if this is the
result of frustration associated with language difficulty).
What are common difficulties the students you work with have when it comes to making
up sentences (both oral & written)?

Turn a letter into nouns

Choose one letter from the alphabet e.g.: H
Who are you? (person)
Where are you? (place)
What is in your hand? (thing)
What are you thinking? (nouns) into sentences.
“My name is Ernest. I am in Bucharest, holding a hamburger and thinking how cold it is today.”

ACTIVITIES:
Check that the child remembers what we have been working on what colours these
words are;
Pictures Description task;
Listen to a story and identify who, doing and what words – write into books into colourful
word bank;
Viewfinder – using a viewfinder e.g. kitchen roll tube/binoculars look around the room
and identify “who is doing what”;
Describing video clips e.g. of the children/YouTube;
Children to make up their own stories;
Mind maps – using verbs, make mind map of all “what” words that could go with that
verb e.g.;
Brush;
Wash.

DISCUSSION ACTIVITY
What makes a sentence more complex?
The boy is waking up;
The boy is eating;
The girl is doing her work;
The girl went out to lunch;

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3 THINGS MAKE A SENTENCE MORE COMPLEX
1. The type of vocabulary used in the sentence (synonyms activities);
2. The use of adjectives and adverbs;
3. The use of conjunctions.

VOCABULARY
Expanding on the child’s vocabulary is important as it enables the student to use a range
of different words in their sentences;
Talking about synonyms with the student encourages them to think of different words that
can be utilised in their sentences.

ADJECTIVES
Adjectives make a sentence more “colourful”;
Adjectives can be referred to as “What like” words when using colourful semantics;
Examples of adjectives: tall, smart, happy, blue.

ADVERBS
Adverbs make a sentence more “colourful”;
Adverbs can be referred to as “How like” words when using colourful semantics;
Examples of adjectives: quickly, slowly, patiently.

SENTENCE CONJUNCTIONS
Sentence conjunctions are a group of words that can be used to make more complex sentences.
They have two roles:
They join sentences;
They indicate the presence of particular meaning-based concepts.

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INTRODUCING THE COLOUR CUE CARDS…

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 COLOURFUL SEMANTICS IN THE CLASSROOM

VOCABULARY
Have large copies of cue cards stuck on blackboard or wall, ready to use;
Put up posters or butchers’ paper containing brainstormed words;
When introducing a new topic brainstorm vocabulary then add to the list with synonyms
for different words.

ADJECTIVES/ADVERBS
• Have students find the key words in a sentence, text or picture underline them in colour etc.
For example:
adjectives – blue what like words;
adverbs – white how like words
• Write a sentence on the board and have students match up the words with the cue cards.
Encourage the students to make the sentence ‘more colourful’ by adding adjectives or
adverbs.
• Encourage students to put more “what like” and “how doing” words into their sentences. This
might be a class goal for the term.
• Have a ‘feely’ bag for ‘what like’ (objects/pictures). What do they look/feel/sound like? e.g.
dog – cute, soft, loud.
• Write down a ‘what like’ word e.g. happy, pass around paper and children think of similar
words (synonyms). Use final list as a word bank for writing stories/recounts, spelling…

CONJUNCTIONS
Brainstorm a class list of conjunctions which are added to over time;
Have students find conjunctions in a sentence, text or picture underline them in brown;
Have two simple sentences and encourage students to use different conjunctions to make
them more complex sentence;
Two bookmarks (children use these to make their sentences) with a ‘joining words’ bridge
in the middle – joining two sentences using joining words e.g.:

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The boy ate his banana THEN he played soccer outside.

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 SHORT TERM GOALS
SMART
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time specific

ABCD Checklist
The four areas to include in your goal are...
Audience - Who is to accomplish the task?
Behaviour - What is the task to be accomplished?
Condition - What are the circumstances of performing the task?
Degree - At what level of proficiency is the task to be accomplished?

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