Expanding my 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 to think about Colourful Semantics. We're going to be using this structure to add more information into your sentences, and I'm going to be sharing some ideas for how you can continue to expand your sentences at home. Throughout all of the activities today, I'm going to be sharing some tips for adults so that they can help you with your use of language throughout your day-to-day 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 both ready, let's begin. Okay, let's start by doing some talking and thinking about expanding your sentences. So as we know, Colourful Semantics is a programme that was developed by a Speech and Language Therapist called Alison Bryan. It's a colour coded approach to show how a sentence is made up, and it breaks parts of the sentence into main roles. Each role has a different meaning and a question and a colour associated to it. Using Colourful Semantics provides a visual and structured approach that helps children to expand their use and understanding of language. It can help to develop their range of vocabulary, as well as their ability to form sentences and narratives about pictures, or events, or scenes that they have been looking at or listening to. By using questions carefully, we can also support children to begin to develop higher-level thinking skills, such as inference or narrative. And we can do this by helping them to pick out clues in the picture to answer questions, and include information in their sentence about when something is happening, and how or what something is happening like. So in today's session, we're going to be adding in when, how, and what like, to our sentences. When, or the time included in a sentence, is always colour coded brown, and can include words like yesterday, last week, on the weekend, or even once upon a time. How or what like words are colour coded on a white background, but have a black cloud outline drawn around them. How doing words are adverbs. These describe how something is done, for example, quickly, gently. Adjectives, that describe what something is like, can include things like feelings or physical attributes. So in this sentence about this picture, you can see that the when has been colour coded brown. At Christmas, Santa hides presents under the tree. And in this sentence, the adverb has been colour coded on a white background. The man is driving the car quickly. So children, now it's time to take some pictures of you. We're going to use these pictures to create some sentences later on. First of all, take some pictures of you doing your favourite activities, and then maybe find some pictures from a magazine or photo albums that you have at home. We're going to use these pictures to talk about who, what doing, what, where, when, what like, or how like. When you've collected up your pictures, come back to the video and press play to continue. As we know, adults, when we're working with children to encourage their language and develop their sentences, we need to be providing good, strong language models, and we can do this by making sure that we work in the whos, the what doings, the whats, the wheres, into our labelling and commenting. This could be when looking at books or pictures, or when talking about the child's favourite TV show or clips from a movie, for example. We also need to remember that we can expand on the child's language. So if a child is beginning to use a few words, we can expand those words into longer phrases, and we can build this kind of language into everyday situations. So as we have done in Lesson 10 and Lesson 11, you're now going to have a go making some symbols and sentence strips for when, what like, or how doing. You'll need some coloured paper or pens, you'll need some scissors for adults to do the cutting, you'll need some paper, writing equipment, and the How To sheet that's included in the downloadable resources with this lesson. So pause the video here to make your symbols for the pictures that you took and gathered up earlier. When you've had to go making some sentences using these symbols, then come back to the video and press play to finish the lesson. Adults, remember it's really important that we use scaffolding strategies for our children, so that they're experiencing success when they're building sentences. And we want to create a language rich environment for children, where they're accessing words in fun-filled, natural ways. If a child is struggling to find a word to complete the sentence, then we can be modelling and reinforcing this through pictures and symbols and other multi-sensory approaches. We can create as many opportunities for talking, modelling, and labelling as possible, and we can encourage our children to have fun with words. 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 working on today. All I'd like to ask now is that you and your adult have a look at the words that you've been including in your sentences, and send some of these word lists to your teacher at school, so that they can see the progress that you're making building sentences. You could also ask your parent or carer to share this word list on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, by taking a picture of it and tagging @OakNational so I can see the 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!

Expanding my sentences

Expanding my sentences

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

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