Building more sentences

Speech and language therapy

﻿Hello everyone, my name's Emma and welcome to today's lesson. I'm looking forward to today's session, and I hope you are too. I can't wait to get started, but before we do just a quick reminder, we here at Oak are here to support any approaches you might already be using and any work you might have already been set. We know this lesson is going out to so many different children and families, so if you're not sure or have any questions, please do contact your child's school or usual speech and language therapy team. In today's session, we're continuing what we started in lesson 10 by talking a little bit more about colourful semantics. I'm going to be giving you some ideas for how you can build more sentences. And then we're going to be creating some more sentence building activities for home. Throughout all of the activities today, I'll be sharing some tips with adults so that they can help you to develop your use of language throughout your everyday activities. So for today's session, you'll need a camera and some pictures. Adults, you'll need some writing equipment and the downloadable resource that's available on the Oak website with this lesson. So before we begin, find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for the lesson, turn off any distractions or notifications that you might have running on your device, and then make sure that you and your adult are seated comfortably. When you're ready, let's begin. Okay, let's do some talking and thinking about building more sentences. So as we know, colourful semantics is an approach developed by Alison Bryan, a speech and language therapist. It's a color-coded approach to show how a sentence is made up, and it breaks the parts of a sentence into four main roles. Each role has a different meaning. This table here summarises the parts of the sentence and the colours that go with them. Colourful semantics encourages a wider and more organised vocabulary, and it helps children to learn new words more effectively. It also helps with extending children's sentences and showing the correct order of words and sentences. The use of WH question words as prompts also helps children to learn to understand and answer questions. In the previous session, we focused on who and what doing. Today, we're going to be extending our sentences by focusing on what and where. The object or the what of the sentence is always color-coded green, and it's usually made up of nouns or object words, for example, things, people, animals, occupations, or pronouns. Location words or where words are color-coded blue, and these can include things like locations but also positions as well. In the picture that we talked about yesterday where the dog is drinking, the object or the what of the sentence that's color-coded green is water, and the blue where is in the kitchen. The dog is drinking water in the kitchen. So now it's time for our first activity. Children, we're going to take some more pictures of you doing some different actions with objects in different places. First, take some pictures of you and then find some pictures in magazines or from photo albums. We're going to use these pictures to start building some who, what doing, what, and where sentences. When you've collected up some pictures and taken some of your own, come back to the video and press play to continue with the lesson. So adults, when we're working with children to encourage them to build some longer sentences, we can use our really familiar strategies because we know when we're working on developing a child's language, our primary role is to model. We need to be modelling who, what doing, what, and where sentence structures throughout the child's everyday. This could be when reading books or looking at pictures. We can point to images and label who, what doing, what, and where. And we can also include this in everyday situations by commenting on what we or the child is doing using that same structure. If a child is using language remember, we can also be expanding the words they're using into short sentences as well. For example, if your child is in a car and they were to comment and say daddy's driving, we could reinforce this by turning it into a expanded sentence. Daddy is driving the car on the road. So we've included the what and the where as well. As we talked about in lesson 10, the great thing about colourful semantics is that it's really visual, and it's really structured, and it works best when we're talking about pictures that are supported by symbols to make sentences. So for the next activity, we're going to focus on making some symbols and sentence strips for what and where. So for today's lesson, you'll need some green or blue paper or pencils, scissors for the adults to cut out any symbols or sentence strips that you make, some plain paper, and some writing equipment, and the downloadable resource. In the downloadable resource, there are a full list of instructions on how to make your symbols and sentence strips with all these resources that you've gathered up. So pause the video here to make some symbols and sentence strips to go alongside the pictures that you took and gathered up at the start of the lesson. Make your symbols and then have a go using them. And when you finish, come back to the video and press play to finish the lesson. Adults, remember that whenever we're working on language and building sentences, we want this to be an errorless learning opportunity. So we can use these scaffolding strategies to help the child to experience success. Remember to give them time to process the questions that you might be using to help them to structure the sentence and give a sentence starter if needed. You could use clues to help them to complete the sentence or give choices to help the child to understand and narrow down their options. Always model and comment on what you see if a child is struggling to make a sentence about a picture. So you could use your language to comment on who, what doing, what, and where in a picture if a child really needs that scaffolding and support. We want to create a language-rich environment by children accessing words in fun-filled ways. Colourful semantics shouldn't be about testing the children, but it should be about creating an activity where words are reinforced through visuals so that the children are more likely to be able to form sentences using them. We want to create as many opportunities for talking for the child as possible so that the children are not only having fun with words but hearing lots of language modelled by the adults around them. Well, that brings us to the end of today's lesson, but a really big well done on all the fantastic sentences that you've been building today. Before you go, I'd like to ask one thing. Children, you could ask your parent or carer to take a picture of some of the words that you have been using in your sentences and send this to your teacher at school so that they can see the progress that you're making with your use of language. You could also send this list of the words that you've been including in your sentences to @OakNational on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram so I can see the fantastic progress that you're making too. Well, all that's left for me to say is thank you but take care and enjoy the rest of your learning today, bye-bye.

Building more sentences

Building more sentences

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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