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Created by a certified Speech-Language Therapist, these are resources which you can use in speech and language therapy, at school or at home to help improve sentence skills.

What is Colourful Semantics?

Colourful Semantics is an approach created by Alison Bryan. It is aimed at helping children 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.

WHO – Orange
DOING – Yellow
WHAT – Green
WHERE – Blue

6 different ways to practice...

Colourful Semantics Classic

Simply drag the right card from the multiple choice answers into the correct place in the sentence.

Colourful Semantics Sorting

Drag the sentence cards into the correct post boxes to complete each challenge. It's fun, intuitive, and keeps learners coming back for more.

Colourful Semantics Silly Mix

Using a starting verb, add more words to the sentence. Practise the sentence every time you add a new word to it. The words can be rearranged at any time. The goal is to create the longest and silliest sentence!

Colourful Semantics Fill Gaps

A photo is shown alongside a sentence with a missing word. The task is to type in the missing word.

Colourful Semantics Find Words

A sentence and coloured highlighters are shown on the screen. Select a highlighter and click on a part of the text to highlight it in the correct colour. Then complete the multiple choice comprehension questions which follow.

Colourful Semantics Sequencing

Choose an activity from our selection to get started and then simply drag the correct card into the correct slot for each question.

Customise to your needs!

You can customise the TTS voice, choose between American or British English...

and alter activity specific settings such as the number of semantic elements to choose the difficulty.

Anchor 1

All of this and more in Voca Quest!

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Voca Quest includes all of the Colourful Semantics activities, and allows you to create your own digital and printable content using our activity templates!

Plus 5000 other activities are available, all designed by a certified Speech and Language Therapist. Minimal Pairs, Preposition Scenes, Flashcards, Odd one out, Semantic feature analysis and more...

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