Building simple 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 that 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 are 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'll be focusing on something called colourful semantics. It's going to help us build some simple sentences. Then, I'm going to be sharing some ideas about how you can continue to build sentences at home. Throughout all of the activities in today's lesson, I'll be sharing some tips for adults so that they can help you develop your use of language. So for today's session, we'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 make sure that you and your adult are seated comfortably. When you're ready, let's begin. Okay, let's start by doing some talking and thinking about building sentences. Colourful semantics is a programme that was developed by a speech and language therapist called Alison Bryan. It's used with children across the country who have a wide variety of speech, language and communication needs. It's a colour coded approach to show how a sentence is made up. Semantics means the meaning of a word or phrase and by colour coding the parts of a sentence that have specific meaning, colourful semantics can help children with the development of their language in lots of ways. For example, it can help children with their understanding of words, their use of words and sentences, their ability to make comments on situations or environments around them, as well as their ability to understand and answer questions. Here, I put a summary table so you can see the colours that are assigned to the parts of the sentence in colourful semantics. As we've said, colourful semantics breaks sentences into four main roles. They are, the subject, the who of the sentence, the what doing, the verb and then they include things like the object of the sentence and the location. In today's session, we're just going to be focusing on building sentences with who and what doing in them. The who or subject of the sentence, is always colour coded orange and includes words that are nouns or naming words. For example, people, animals, occupations and pronouns. The what doing or the action word of a sentence, is always colour coded yellow. These can include standalone verbs or verbs associated with objects. For example, washing car or brushing hair. If we're looking at this picture and we wanted to make a sentence about it, the first thing that we need is the who. Who's in this picture? That's right, the dog. What's the dog doing? Excellent, the dog is drinking. So in the sentence, the dog is drinking, the dog is colour colour coded orange because it's the subject and the verb is drinking, is colour coded yellow. It's the action word. The dog is drinking. Let's see if we can have another go at making a sentence but this time about this picture. Pause the video on this page to talk about who and what doing in this picture with your adult at home. Excellent, the monkey is climbing. So now it's time for some colourful semantics at home. Children, you and your adult are going to take some pictures of you doing different things. These could be your favourite activities. Then, you could find some pictures from magazines or photo albums. We're going to use these pictures to start building some who and what doing sentences. Once you and your adult have taken some pictures and found some other pictures that you want to talk about, let's come back to the video and press play to continue. Adults, there are a few things that we can do to encourage our children and support them to develop their ability to make sentences. The first thing is that through any kind of activity where we're working with language, our main role needs to be to model language. So we need to be modelling, joining who and what doing words together to make sentences about pictures. This doesn't just need to be about pictures though, we could use this language model throughout all of our day-to-day activities. So when looking at books together, we could point to pictures and talk with our children about who is in the picture and what doing. We could make sure that we're building this into play time and other fun activities that we do with the child throughout their day-to-day by commenting and labelling things like Mummy drinking or Billy building. If our child is using language, we can also use strategies like expanding to really help our child form some sentences as well. So if a child is using single words, we could support our child by expanding to including the what doing part of the sentence. A quick example is that if a child is playing with a toy car for example and labels it car, we the adult, could model expanding this into a simple sentence by saying the car is driving. One of the great things about colourful semantics is that it's so visual and really helps children to work towards building more sentences because it's so structured. As you've gathered up your pictures to start doing some colourful semantics at home, now we need to make some visuals to go alongside that. We're going to make some symbols and sentence strips for our colourful semantics packs at home. In order to do this, you're going to need some coloured paper or pencils. The paper would need to be orange and yellow. If you don't have any orange and yellow paper, you would just need some orange and yellow pens. You'll need some scissors for the adults to do some cutting and you'll need some plain paper. The plain paper you can use to write your nouns and verbs or naming words and doing words in orange and yellow, to match with the pictures that you're using and you'll also need some writing equipment. There is a list of how to make these symbols and sentence strips in the downloadable resource which is attached with this lesson. So for the next activity, you're going to need the instructions to be able to make your symbols for the pictures that you've gathered at home. So now it's time to pause the activity to complete the visuals and symbols that you'll need for the pictures that you gathered. Once you've created your symbols and sentence strips and you've had a go using them, come back to the video and press play to continue with the rest of the lesson. Remember, with colourful semantics and any other kind of language building activity, we want to create an everlasting learning experience for our child. So when we're presenting a picture and we're talking about who and what doing in it, make sure you give the child plenty of time to respond first. You can try scaffolding strategies like providing a sentence starter or a clue to help them find the symbol or the word that they need to complete the sentence. You could also give choices of the symbols to complete the sentence and lastly, you can model and comment on what you see to help the child to understand who and what doing in each picture that you're talking about. We want to create a language rich environment where children are accessing words in fun filled, natural ways. When we're reinforcing the words that we're using with multisensory approaches, they're more likely to stick. So the more symbols and pictures that we can gather up to support the words that we want to model, the better. Well, that brings us to the end of today's session but a really big well done on all the sentences that you started to build today at home. I just got two things I'd like to ask you to do. Adults, if you could write down a couple of things that you've learned in today's session, that would be great. Children, maybe you could ask your adult to send a list of some of the who and what doing sentences that you've been working on at home to your teacher at school, so that they can see the fantastic progress that you're making with your use of language. You could also ask your parent or carer to share this list of words on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, tagging @OakNational so I can see the fantastic progress that you're making using language too. Well, all that's left for me to say is thank you but take care and enjoy the rest of your learning, bye bye.

Building simple sentences

Building simple sentences

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

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