Children’s Speech and Language Therapy
Colourful Semantics
The Colourful Semantics approach was created by Speech and Language Therapist Alison Bryan.
It uses colour coding to help children to develop their sentence building skills.
How does it work?
Colours are used to help children to identify the important elements in sentences, and learn
how to put these together in the correct order.
Children are gradually taught to associate different ‘types’ of words with particular colours, in a
step-by-step approach. The colour coded elements can then be used to build sentences which
range from simple combinations of two to three words, to longer and more complex sentences.
For example, the colour coded strip below shows the colours used for the elements:
• ‘Who?’ - also known as the ‘subject’, e.g. ‘the lady’ (orange)
• ‘What doing?’ – also known as the ‘verb’, e.g. ‘is drinking’ (yellow)
• ‘What?’ – also known as the ‘object’, e.g. ‘orange juice’ (green)
• ‘Where?’ – also known as the ‘location’, e.g. ‘in the kitchen (blue)
This prompt would be used with a child who was working on creating sentences such as “The
man is eating an ice cream in the park”
“The girl is drawing a picture at school”.
