Building Oral Language and Sentence structure

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:

1. WHO – Orange
2. WHAT DOING – Yellow
3. WHAT – Green
4. 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 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 students with a range of Speech, Language and Communication Needs including:

• Specific Language Impairment
• Developmental Delay or Disorder
• Autistic Spectrum Condition
• 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 students 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(up to 3)

Gives students access to a rich set of tools for thinking about language. Students learn to recognise common patterns in sentence construction and then discover how these patterns relate to real life situations. As well as helping students to become fluent communicators, this process teaches them important concepts such as:

• How words combine into phrases and sentences

• What makes up a complete thought

• How different types of word order affect meaning

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colourful semantics structure

 

Colourful semantics helps children understand the structure of sentences. It can be used to colour code and identify grammatical structures. This approach acts as a code helping students to process the otherwise invisible details in sentences. Our block building process can be used to help students play with structure and develop complete sentences. Because students are using a playful tool, the building blocks, the structure can be manipulated multiple times until the students creates the correct sentence. This encourages students to try out new ideas and not be so worried about 'being wrong'. The incremental nature of using building blocks means that students can develop a three part sentence or four part sentence and gradually increase the complexity. Getting the foundations for sentence production right using a colour coding approach builds confidence and autonomy.

How can colourful semantics develop expressive language skills? 

You may well have children in your class with a developmental language disorder. Language development in children who struggle with speech sounds and/or vocabulary, is characterised by poor use of syntax and morphology, difficulty producing meaningful utterances, and difficulties comprehending others' messages. Children with phonological disorders tend to produce short, ungrammatical utterances which lack cohesion. They also make frequent errors involving sound-symbol correspondences. Language impairments in children are common. Children with specific language impairment usually display delays in acquiring basic linguistic abilities. In order to succeed in school children need to develop a certain level of academic language proficiency. Children with language difficulties find it difficult to express themselves clearly and coherently. This makes them less likely to participate fully in classroom discussions and more prone to making mistakes.

Fun and Engaging Heggerty Phonemic Awareness program

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, students receive daily practice in both. This explicit instruction scaffolds support for students to work with early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills. With daily lessons, students are able to build the necessary foundation to become automatic decoders of print.

The instruction provided throughout the daily lessons can be customised to meet the individual needs of each learner. Teachers can provide support for students through teacher modeling and kinesthetic hand motions and the students stay engaged.

Students who excel can be challenged with advanced phonemic awareness activities that focus on deleting and substituting phonemes, which will help them add new multi‐syllabic words to their sight vocabulary.

Students who have limited proficiency with the English language may benefit from phonemic awareness instruction in their native language. The focus of the lessons is on isolating sounds, blending sounds into words, and manipulating sounds, rather than vocabulary development.

Students can receive explicit instruction in sounds when working with an teacher assistant for additional support. This may be in addition to the instruction that is provided within the classroom. The teacher assistant can provide targeted instruction for specific skills and an intervention lesson may last around 5-7 minutes.

Studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a foundational skill, essential for learning to read. As students learn to identify sounds through oral and auditory activities, they become phonemically aware. Engaging in phonemic awareness instruction develops students’ understanding of sounds, and that knowledge directly impacts their spelling and writing.

First of all, you will want to take a look at what it is.  You can download sample lesson plans on their website at this link.  They have uploaded a sample plans.  (I've been using this Pre-K book with my Transitional New Entrants.) There are also plans from the Kindergarten book and the Primary book. 

Start at the Beginning of the Book- (No Matter What Time of Year You Begin)

I heard about it at a professional development course around Structured Literacy and also had a chat with our RTLit teachers.
It is designed to be used DAILY and start from Week 1 - do not skip ahead to the week you are in.

Consistency is the Key

Like many skills, consistency is the key to learning phonemic awareness, and daily practice makes the difference!  I use the program consistently five days a week. It's actually quite easy to plan for! You just cross off a fifteen minute time block for the Heggerty Book Phonemic Awareness exercises, and turn the page to the next week on Fridays!  lt's an easy lesson plan, no prep habit!

Keep the Pace Up 

Once both you and the kids know the routine, the quicker you can take them through the exercises, the happier you'll all be!  It's easier to keep the kids' attention if you keep the lesson moving than if you go slowly.  The kids will get a TON of repetition on every skill, so there is no reason to dwell on each one.  

Don't Stop the Lesson Once You Start

Let your class know that you will not call on them if they have questions during the lesson.  If someone raises a hand to stop you to ask a question, just shake your head, "no," meaning, "Not right now- wait a few minutes."  My students have gotten so good at their Heggerty phonemic awareness lessons that we usually get through them in about seven minutes, not counting singing the ABC song at the beginning and the Nursery Rhyme at the end!  Below you can see an example of one of the Nursery Rhyme videos with motions that we do afterwards!

Use Consistent Hand Motions for the Exercises

The Heggerty book includes descriptions of hand motion cues to use for many of their exercises, but not all. Of course, you can always make up your own!  But I would highly suggest that you be consistent with your movements.  If you teach the kids to "punch the ending sound" one week, then stick with that unless there is a reason to change it.  And here is a tip:  

And by the way, if your kids don't know all of the letter sounds. Example of songs to do letters and sounds.

Here is an example of how the lesson plan looks like in action. 

Week 1 Day 2 Pre K program