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Colourful Semantics
What is Colourful Semantics?
Colourful Semantics is an approach aimed at enhancing language development in children. Developed by Speech and Language Therapist Alison Bryan, this method is used as an intervention to support language and sentence structure with children (verbally and written).
Colourful Semantics is deeply rooted in the meaning of words—what we call semantics. It helps children just starting to acquire vocabulary, children who mixing up sentence order or struggling to piece together meaningful sentences.
How does it work?
We break up sentence into four different categories:
- ‘Who?’ – also known as the ‘subject’, e.g. ‘the man’ (orange)
- ‘What doing?’ – also known as the ‘verb’, e.g. ‘is eating’ (yellow)
- ‘What?’ – also known as the ‘object’, e.g. ‘an ice cream’ (green)
- ’Where?’ – also known as the ‘location’, e.g. ‘in the park’ (blue)
Children learn to use these colours to begin constructing sentences them
selves. Typically, this starts with simple two to three-word phrases and gradually progresses to longer, more complex constructions, fostering a solid foundation for effective communication.
Examples of coloured cards used to support sentence construction.
Examples of vocabulary mats used for whole-class teaching.
