If a child has good literacy skills, you can also link colourful semantics into reading and writing activities too. For example, give them a reading book and ask them to colour code different parts of a sentence.
They can provide training on how to use colourful semantics with specific children or if this is something you want to incorporate into your classroom, then they can provide training on a whole school approach.
Do you use colourful semantics in your classroom? Colourful semantics is an approach designed by Alison Bryan to help pupils develop their grammar skills and support them with sentence structure. Sentences are cut up and the words are colour-coded by their role in the sentence.
Colourful semantics is a targeted approach developed by Alyson Bryan that can help pupils understand better sentence structure. It uses a colour coded system where different parts of speech are represented by a different colour (subject-green, verb-yellow, object-red etc). Please note that in the photos on this post the colours are different to the Colourful semantics approach, as this is what I use in my current school.
I use colourful semantics as part of literacy workstation activities where my pupils have to make a sentence related to the picture shown. Depending on the level a pupil is at, I may use symbols and text or text only, shorter or longer sentences and different word options to see if a pupil can choose the correct one.
Colourful semantics perfectly resonates with everything that I have been doing in my lessons. Grammar structures and the format of the sentence are an abstract concept, beyond the grasp of pre-schoolers especially those who live in their own country, surrounded mostly by their mother tongue and not exposed to a sufficient amount of the target language. By using some kind of a visual representation of the parts of speech or the parts of the sentence, we make it more accessible to them and we enable production.
Get in touch with Saffira (@onlinespeechie) in order to get your own set of the ready-made cards. It is a perfect way of familiarising yourself with the colourful semantics in practice and to understand how it can be adapted to our EFL context. Although, of course, these cards can be used in the EFL classroom as they are, depending on the level of your students.
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