Crick Software blog

Siobhan Butel

Colorful semantics and Clicker

March 16, 2022

Do you use colorful semantics in your classroom? Colorful semantics is an approach designed by Alison Bryan to help students develop their grammar skills and support them with sentence structure. Sentences are cut up and the words are color-coded by their role in the sentence.

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

"Coming from a teaching background I am familiar with the time it takes to create resources for colorful semantics. In the past I would create the symbols I would need all with the right colored 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 student in the process at the same time. All this is done using Clicker."

Tom shared a short video about how he used Clicker to create an accessible colorful semantics activity centered around Julia Donaldson’s story “Zog”:

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

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