Tania's Professional Learning Blog

This is my new favourite activity to do with my class. They are engaged and really show improvement in the sentence structure, formulating a sentence orally and confidence. What is Colourful Semantics? Colourful semantics is an approach created by Alison Bryan. It is aimed at helping students 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. Pictures are also used to help construct the sentences and they are also colour coded to match the above. For example: WHO – Orange WHAT DOING – Yellow WHAT – Green WHERE – Blue The approach is used in stages and helps students develop language and vocabulary in addition to grammatical structure. It can be used to help students who are starting to develop language and have limited vocabu...

Phonemic awareness is essential in teaching students to be automatic decoders of print. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum provides students with consistent and repeated instruction, and this transfers to developing a student’s decoding and encoding skills. All students participate in the lessons as part of the Tier 1 curriculum. As they grow more confident they may still be developing phonemic awareness skills and may benefit from instruction in the areas of blending segmenting, substituting, and deleting phonemes. The lessons are designed to provide daily instruction in eight phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Students practice blending, segmenting, and manipulating words, syllables, and phonemes each day. Most literacy curriculum currently available places minimal focus on phonemic awareness, only practicing one to two skills each day. The two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness. (Adams, 1990) With this program, s...