Crick Software blog

Siobhan Butel

Colourful semantics and Clicker

16th March 2022

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.

Recently Tom McDonald, of access: technology, explored using Clicker to help with colourful semantics.

"Coming from a teaching background I am familiar with the time it takes to create resources for colourful semantics. In the past I would create the symbols I would need all with the right coloured background. I would then print, laminate and cut the symbols. I would then sometimes even add Velcro to the reverse. If this is sounding familiar to you, then please rest assured that there is another way which can cut the time it takes to make the resources as well as being able to include the pupil in the process at the same time. All this is done using Clicker."

Tom shared a short video about how he created an accessible colourful semantics activity centered around Julia Donaldson’s story “Zog”:

On LearningGrids, you’ll also find Clicker Sets to support colourful semantics and lots of other grammar activities.

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