#kidscanspeak

Crumbs #10: Silly pictures

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So here is a picture, have a look.

www.seanparks.net, also reproduced by allisonfors.com and aulap.org

Can you see what I see? Are you thinking what I am thinking?

This adventure started like many others, really, with google and one of those straightforwardly mindless searches and a hope that the engine can actually pleasantly surprise you once more. this time it was ‘silly pictures for kids, clip art’ or something similar.

When I came up, I tried to take in all the absurdities all at once but at the same time, my teaching brain was firing at me with the many ideas of how I could use it in class. If I had been an ancient Greek philospher, most likely, I would be running around shouting ‘Eureka’ but since I am only a humble teacher, the only reaction was a rather excited mumble ‘THIS is going to be SO good!’

Now, this Crumbs post is going to be slightly different. We are still in the middle of winter holidays so there hasn’t been a chance to properly trial and test it with mu kids. but I am going to share it anyway, now, and the real classroom experience is going to be added in a week.

Here are the activities I am planning for next week

Preschoolers: Yes and No.

With my second year preschoolers, we are going to use the winter scene as this one is most relevant due to the what’s happening in the world outside of our windows and because the vocabulary and structures that we are already familiar and this picture has a chance of being most productive.

Yes and No is a game that my kids are familiar with. The teacher makes a sentence about the picture, which can be true or false and the kids have to react to it and correct it, using either a full sentence or only a phrase, depending on their abilities.

For example:

T: I can see a girl. She is sliding on a doughnut.

SS or S 1: Yes / Yes, it’s true.

T: I can see a girl. She is wearing one yellow hat.

SS or S: No. She is wearing 5 hats.

https://www.pinterest.ru/pin/96686723224800785/

Primary: Can you see something really silly?

Step 1: Prediction

T tells the kids that they are going to see a picture of a campsite. T asks the whole class to guess what might be in the picture. To make it even more dramatic, T can ask the kids to close their eyes, imagine that they are in the forest and say what is happening. T may preteach some of the campsite-related words that kids might not be familiar with yet.

Step 2: Silly campsite

T tells the students that the campsite that they are going to see is a little silly. Kids work in pairs. T gives out a copy of the picture per pair. Kids circle and describe all the silly things they can see.

Step 3: What’s the silliest thing in the picture?

To round up, each student chooses one thing in the picture that they think is the silliest one.

www.seanparks.net, also reproduced by allisonfors.com and aulap.org

Primary: Silly pictures reading practice

This one was inspired by an activity I found on aulapt.org and, automatically, I wanted to have my own. Here is it, created on wordwall and it will be shared as an additional homework task.

Primary: Tell me about this boy…Because

All these silly picture scenes are going to be the main character in our free speaking activities that has become a regular feature in our lessons recently.

One of the easiest activities to apply here is ‘Tell me about this boy‘. In the beginning, the teacher is leading the activity, chosing the people, animals or objects to describe and the students, in turns, decide what information they want to share. Now we have reached the stage when the kids are comfortable enough with working in pairs and taking turns in choosing the parts of the illustration for their partners and describing what was selected for them.

Now, with this new resources and all the absurdity, I would like to go in the direction of looking for rationale for their actions. We will try to play ‘Because‘. It might not always be easy but since the students are in charge of their discourse (well, ok, their mini-discourse), they can focus on how the people are feeling, what they like or don’t like or what they did before that might have had an impact on their non-standard behaviour now. Especially that we have just started talking about the past, using was/were and the affirmative forms of the regular and irregular verbs so that might be just a perfect opportunity to practise these.

Stage 1: Extended modelling

T: Tell me about this animal.

S1: It is a bull. It is swimming.

T: Because he likes water.

T: Tell me about this man.

S2: He is sitting. He’s got a big fork.

T: Because he is very hungry.

Stage 2: Because

Since this is a new kind of an activity and it might quite challenging to find the rationale for all the actions, we will play it together, to ensure a good brainstorming session. Kids will be choosing what they want to talk about and the whole class will try to say what everyone is doing and why.

In the worst case scenario, we might resort to our ‘Because because’ answer which they sometimes use or we might just go for a simple ‘Because it’s fun’.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91l29YCYn2L.SL1500.jpg


This ia brand new adventure for us. I will be back in a few weeks to let you know whether it was a story of success or yet another epic fail story to post on this blog, too.

If you are interested in our free speaking practice circle, have a look at this post and if you would like to know more about what EFL teachers can learn from speech therapists – here is another post to check out!

If you are looking for more ideas on using pictures in speaking activities, here are two posts from the series of ‘All you need is…a picture’ and, its Volume 2 (because activities are accumulating:-)

PS A word of confession: it was very difficult to resource these illustrations. They have been posted, reposted and shared a million times, sometimes losing the artist on the way. I did my best!

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Crumbs # 9: Storytelling noughts and crosses

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Today a post about a post about one of my favourite games ever: noughts and crosses. I have written about it already on this blog because I use with illustrations, to practise vocabulary and with my preschoolers, too, to increase production.

Today it is storytelling noughts and crosses!

Instructions

  • Demonstrate or check that all your students know how to play noughts and crosses, in the traditional, non-EFL way. It can be done with one of the stronger students, on the board.
  • Draw an EFL grid of the game, on the board, filling it up with the words you want the students to use. I normally start to use it to tell stories when we get to the lessons with the Past Simple and normally we play the game just to talk about our ‘yesterday’, our ‘last weekend’ or ‘last summer’, not to put too much pressure on the kids and to get them into the habit of using the language. These are some of the grids that we used with my A1 primary, aged 7 – 9. The symbols at the top mean nothing and they just help us identify different grids.
  • Introduce the characters that the kids are going to talk about. One of the unsung heroes of my lessons has been one Mr Milk who has been with us for a good few years* and who has been kind enough to bring some of his friends along. For that reason, figuring out who can be the character is never a problem. Mr Milk always goes first, the others follow suit.
  • Demonstrate how to play the game on the board. This time we have done it: teacher vs the group, represented by one of the students at the board and the whole class participating, choosing the verbs and telling the story.
  • This version of the game is slightly more challenging because you not only have to use the verb. It is very necessary that you also continue a story. Of course, students are allowed to use more than one sentence (yes, please, do!!!) but the key verb (or the key word) is the one that they have to use. These are some of the grids we used this week. As you can see, they are all very basic but hey, that’s what it is, the real classroom life. Sometimes the handouts are pretty and picture perfect, sometimes they are not. Sorry – not sorry.
  • Students play in pairs and they are told to play until the very end, when all the verbs have been used in the story.
  • The teacher monitors and eavesdrop on some of the precious lines created such as ‘Miss Apple ate an apple (a normal one, not a person!)‘ or ‘Miss Umbrella drank the rain‘.
  • In the end, when everybody has finished, the teacher asks some feedback questions, for example ‘Was it a happy story or a sad story?‘, ‘What happened in the end?‘, ‘What was the best part?’ and all the pairs are invited to share something about their stories.
  • Next step is the scores. I usually prepare a few sets, like this one in the photo. One of the students chooses one of the letters and the teacher draws the grid on the board. Students count their points and we write them on the board.
  • We normally play two or three rounds, depending on the time we have.

Why we love it

  • We love Mr Milk and all his friends.
  • We love stories.
  • It takes a few minutes to prepare (High five to all the lazy teachers!)
  • It generates lots and lots of language (High five to production greedy teachers!)
  • It is motivating because of the scoring system but it is not very competitive since we use the most random points sets and you never know what you might get, 1 point or 1 000 000 points.
  • It helps to develp creativity and imagination.
  • It has a lot more potential for developing listening skills (if only one round is played and the kids have to retell the story to the rest of the group) or reading and writing skills, too (if the sets are given for homework and the students are asked to write a short story using the same nine verbs that they have used in class. During the following lessons, the kids can exchange and read their stories, too).

Happy teaching!

*) I have just realised that Mr Milk has been accompanying my teaching life for about twelve years now… And that he might actually deserve his own post. Just a second, please!

We want more. We ALWAYS want more! Maximising language production

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Here is my favourite character who would be a perfect amabassador for ‘We want more‘, my professional obsession (you might have noticed:-) and some of my favourite solutions for the classroom.

Trick number 1: The language

Regardless of what coursebook is used or what curriculum is followed, there are certain language items that can be included even in the pre-primary programme that will enable children to communicate and produce more language.

Some of these language items include:

  • descriptive adjectives, such as big – small, long – short, happy – sad, beautiful – ugly, serious – funny, old – new, etc. Introducing them in opposites will make it easier for the students to understand and to remember
  • simple linkers, introduced gradually, starting with ‘and’ (‘blue and green’, ‘cats and dogs’, ‘I like bananas and apples’), then moving on to ‘because’ ( starting with ‘I am happy because it is sunny’) and perhaps even ‘but’ (‘I like dancing but I don’t like dancing with a bear’, like in the song from Super Simple Songs).
  • introduce Present Continuous, because it will be easy to play with it in all the miming games and it will come in very handy while describing pictures and telling stories.
  • talking about other people. Personalisation is very important while learning language, not only with the little ones, but it is also a good idea to start introducing other people and the language we need to talk about them such as ‘she/he is / has got / can / likes’

Trick number 2: The freedom of speech

This freedom of speech has got very little with the civil rights. It is all about the degree of freedom that the students are given or, in other words, about the scaffolding and the support that are slowly removed in order not to limit the students and to enable them to choose what they want to talk about.

One way of doing it is shifting from closed yes/no questions towards more open-ended questions. ‘What do you like to eat?’ is more likely to generate more language that only ‘Do you like bananas?’ which will lead to one-word answers or maybe even only gestures. ‘Tell me about‘ will be a lot more generative.

Using this approach while working with illustrations, pictures or any kind of visuals will give students the opportunity to choose for themselves what to talk about. And it is quite likely that they will pick the topics (elements or aspects of the picture) that they are either more interested in, have more knowledge of or are better prepared to discuss. In any case, more language is likely to be generated.

Examples or real activities? Here you are:

Pairs is a speaking activity that uses a simple material of a set of pictures. The students put them in pairs, in any way they want. They also have to justify their choice. In case of the younger learners, this principle can be the colour (‘Panda and zebra. They are black and white’) but kids can also choose any other reason for that, like ‘Zebra and horse, they have 4 legs’ or ‘Bear and deer. They live in the forest’.

This activity can be also used with the older students who are given a list of words and have to put them in pairs, according the knowledge and the language they have.

Below you can see the end of the game with my pre-primary student. It started off slowly, with simple sentences about the colours that the animals have in common but as the activity progressed, the categories changed, too and we have here an example of animals that have a long tail (a lizard and a monkey), animals that live in the forest (a bear, a fox and a deer) or animals that like meat (a tiger and a lion).

This is the final product of our Pairs activity, using the visuals on Miro

Tell me about is another activity that uses a visual, for example a set of pictures with animals or a picture scene. Students choose an element for their peers to describe, for example Tell me about this boy’ and it is easy to imagine the variety of responses that these can generate. Students can choose to talk they boy’s clothes, feelings or actions.

Trick number 3: The appropriate activities and materials

Our students do what we want them to do. It is assumed so, precisely because we are teachers and they are students. The roles have been assigned once and for all. The question to ask yourself, though, is Would they really want to do it, if they had a choice? Is there anything in the task itself that would encourage them to? Or not.

Certainly, it does not meant that all those less-exciting-but-crucial activities will be renounced forever, because even though they are not always fun from the point of view of our students, they might still be necessary and useful, but it is an interesting aspect to start taking into consideration while lesson planning.

Here a few activities that use that principle

Yes or no? This is an activity that also uses visuals as the basis. In the first stages of the activity, the teacher describes the picture using very simple structure ‘I can see’ when some of the sentences are true and some are false. Students listen to the sentences and correct the sentences. In case of the pre-primary students, this is likely to be one-word production but with time, they are learning to respond in full sentences. Later on, when the students are familiar with the format of the activity, they are invited to take a leading role in the activity, also producing true or false sentences about the picture for the teacher and their peers to correct.

Kids love the game because they can correct the teacher’s mistake and they are allowed to create their own un-true sentences about the pictures and to try to trick the teacher. I have used it both with primary and pre-primary students. The younger kids, naturally, needed more time to adjust and to start producing full sentences, in the beginning they would only provide the key information, for example the colour or the number of objects but, eventually, they were comfortable enough with producing full sentences. At approximately the same time, they were ready to lead the game, too. The older, primary students could make this transition within a lesson.

This is how we were telling our own version of ‘Pete the Cat. I’m rocking in my school shoes’ using the visuals on Miro

Storytelling for pre-primary is based on picture description. Here, the easily available materials might involve the stories from the coursebooks for pre-primary, retelling together any other story used in class or even any of the materials in the YLE Starters materials. In this case storytelling is scaled down to simple picture description, in the appropriate sequence.

Storytelling for primary can also use the visuals but it can be more challenging with the use of storydice or a storytelling treasure hunt (see here)

The lion and the kitten is a simple boardgame that has been very helpful in encouraging the students to produce the language. It was created and used with the online 1-1 pre-primary students. The game does not use a dice. Instead the students can choose the box where they want to go next and in each round, they have to talk about one of the pictures hidden under the yellow, orange and blue diamonds. In the beginning the sentences are very simple and focus on simple vocabulary (‘It’s mommy‘), later on these can be exchanged for a more detailed description (‘Mommy is happy‘ or ‘Mommy is dancing‘) and even further extended with the use of ‘because’ (‘Mommy is dancing because she is happy’) or in any other way that is within the children’s linguistic ability.

This game gives children a lot of freedom and almost a guaranteed victory. The cards can be changed easily, especially in the online format, and even if not, new sentences can be made every time the game is played. With a group of children, a dice would probably have to be used.

This is the board for our boardgame, also created using the visuals available on Miro.

Are you in the park? is a simple guessing game turned into a role-play. Each student has a city plan (since this was the language that we were working at the time) and three stickers which they glue somewhere ‘in the city’. They keep their picture secret and they try to guess where their partner is at the time.

Student A: Are you at the bank / park / market?

Student B: Yes, I am / No, I am not.

After a while, they can ask for help.

Student A: Please help me.

Student B: I can see…I can hear…I can smell….

Student A: You are…

Initially, the stickers were introduce only to prevent the kids from ‘cheating’ but they absolutely loved having random leftover stickers all over the place. In the first lesson we play, it was pirates, in the second one, it was farm. They laughed a lot about having little pigs and chicks all over their cities. The other incentive was the opportunity to imagine and to describe the places from the angle of what they saw, heard and smelled in different places in the city. The kids had the full control over the game and they were making the decision themselves when to move to the second stage.

For some more tricks, please see my other posts: the discourse clock, pairwork for preschoolers or using ambiguity to get the students to talk.

Happy teaching!

All you need is…a picture!

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A post by a lazy teacher who likes to ditch the tasks and the responsibility onto her students, even those little ones.

A post by a greedy teacher who always wants more and whose main aim of every lesson is: language production. And then more language production.

A post by a teacher who first shared these ideas at the Cambridge Back to School webinars in August 2020.

A post by a teacher, about materials management or 00000 different ways to use the same picture.

A post with activities that were inspired by some of the YLE Cambridge exams but approached in an open-minded way…Ready, steady, go!

P.S. Don’t forget to check out of the second part this post.

There is only one picture…

created using an image from classroomclipart.com and Miro

Before you even look: tell the students that it is a picture of a bedroom, have them predict what they might see…Then we look at the real one and check.

Tell me about this room: the students describe the room, using the language that they are familiar with, ‘there is’, ‘I can see’, perhaps only the nouns, perhaps nouns and colours and prepositions.

Riddles: the kids make up simple riddles for their partners to guess. ‘It is black and it is on the chair’.

Stickers dictation: this one is more appropriate for the lower levels and was inspired by the sticker activity in the Superminds coursebooks by CUP. It is also a perfect opportunity to use up all the leftover stickers that no one ever asks for. Students work in pairs and they upgrade the illustrations in their coursebooks (as in: any illustrations) with the stickers. Student A is telling student B where to put the five stickers in one of the coursebooks and then they swap roles.

Teacher = Cheater: the kids open their books and look at the picture. The teacher tells them about her non-existent picture which is, surprisingly, very different from the picture in the coursebook.

Students = Cheaters: the kids describe their made-up rooms, also, very different from the bedroom that they are looking at.

In my real room: particularly appropriate for the online classes since the children will be already sitting in their rooms and can easily compare the illustration with the reality but can be done in the offline lessons, too.

Because: students describe the picture but instead of just focusing on what exactly they can see they try to find the rationale for what they can see. ‘The books are on the floor because….’

The story behind the picture: even such an uninspiring picture in which nothing is happening (really) can be a starting point to writing a story or telling a story. The only thing that you need is a set of questions to get them started, for example: Who lives in this room, a boy or a girl? How old is he/she? What is his / her name? What does he / she like? He / she is not in his/her room. Where is he/she? What is he/she doing? What did he/she do before? What is he / she going to do next?

Dice games: the teacher has to assign the structures to each of the numbers on the dice and these can be easily adapted to the level of the students. The standard set might include: 1 = I can see, 2 = There is, 3 = There are, 4 = It’s on / under / in, 5 = It’s green / red, 6 = It’s big/ small / beautiful. You can also include: I like, I don’t like, …is doing what, is happy/ sad/angry, there aren’t any and so on, depending on the picture. Kids work in pairs, roll the dice and describe the picture using the assigned structures.

Noughts and crosses: It takes three lines to turn any picture into a noughts and crosses game. Students play the game in pairs but before they put their mark in one of the boxes, they have to describe what they can see there in one, two or even three sentences. To keep the kids interests up, a marking scheme can be introduced, a twin grid, with points which is of course kept secret until the end of the round (in Miro – under the noughts and crosses grid, on paper – on the corner that is folded under). This way we always have a winner, the person who collects more points for the boxes that they have described. Sometimes we have two winners, too, the logical one and the mathematical one.

Memory games: first, the students get to look at the picture for a minute or two. The teacher asks them to remember the details, all the colours, actions, number of children and so on. Afterwards, the students are divided into teams. The teacher can use either a set of pre-prepared sentences some of which are true and some of which are false. The teams pick out one of the cards, read the sentence and check how much they remember. This version is more T-centred but it has the advantage of additional reading practice. In another version, the students get to look at the picture again and make up a sentence about it, for the other team to guess. They can also write their own set of sentences which will be later used to test the other team.

There are two pictures…

I can make it different: the starting point is a picture and it can be copied and upgraded in any way the teacher sees fit, using all the beautiful tools that the Miro board has to offer (google image search and icons). It will take some time but it means that it can be adapted to the level, skills and interests of a particular group and then saved and recycled forever. Just like these two pictures here…

Predict the Differences: the children can only see one of the pictures and they try to figure out all the ways in which the two pictures can differ. It might be especially effective if they are already familiar with the task format and know that they have to be looking out for different patterns, activities, objects that the people are holding, throwing, the comparisons between two objects, the location on the right or left side of the picture and so on.

Predict the Differences Quiz: the idea is the same but we add the competitive element and another skill as the teams or pairs of students are asked to write ten potential differences between the picture they can see and the other one. The team that manages to better at predicting wins.

Find the difference: we can ask the students to work in pairs but to find all the differences without showing their picture to the partner. This is not going to be a strict Movers or Flyers preparation task but we are going to raise the level of challenge and they students will really have to listen carefully in order to establish how these two pictures are different.

One big and ten small pictures: it is not necessary to kill another tree to ensure that each child has two pictures right in front of their eye. One, enlarged copy of Picture A can be displayed on the board (or on the screen) and compared with the picture B in students’ coursebooks.

Accidental friends: illustrations that were created not as a ‘find the difference’ task but can easily serve the purpose. Examples? Any of the Movers and Starters reading and writing story tasks or any of the Movers or Flyers speaking story tasks…The theme is already there and looking for differences can be a nice warm-up to storytelling or story-writing activities…

Very, very different: the illustrations that can be used in this kind of a task do not even have to be specifically created with that purpose in mind. Any (and I mean it: any) two pictures depicting ‘a bedroom’ can be used to find the differences. The crazily pink exhibit A here and practically any page of the IKEA catalogue…And pronto!

YLE listening task recycled: these can be used as a listening task, to prepare for the format and to develop listening skills but they can be later used again as a colouring dictation activity. Students work in pairs, one is in charge of the coloured pencils and speaking (‘Colour the bird yellow’), the other one – in charge of the colouring page and listening. Half-way through the activity they swap roles.

This is already more productive but the best is yet to come. Since it is a freer practice activity and students make their own decisions regarding the choice of the colours, it is quite likely that all the pictures will be different. And then…Yes, we can compare them, in groups of four.

Actually, even a leftover listening copies can be used in the same way (Saving the planet, remember?). After all, regardless of which exam it is, the students only have to colour five elements of the picture and the rest of them can be used in a speaking task like that.

Colouring printables: can be used in exactly the same way. Not all the pages will do, for example a large drawing of a cat does not really offer too much as an object to be described and I try not to use colouring pictures which are too big as some students like to be precise and colouring those might take too much of the precious time of the lesson. Other than that, just open google and type in: a child’s bedroom colouring page…Ready! And if there are any words that the students don’t know yet, we can always learn them. Even if they are not on the YLE word list and just because ‘a dragonfly’ might be a cool word to know😊

Which one is different?

Which one is different? Why?

Vocabulary practice: we only need four pictures out of is one is different. It might be a set of four objects, three of which are blue and one of which is red and the students do not even need to know the name of all of the objects. They can still complete the task by using the structure ‘It’s blue’ or even ‘blue’. We can create such by using icons or google images on the Miro board or by arranging and re-arranging the flashcards that accompany our books.

Grammar practice: the focus here can be chosen depending on the topic of the lesson and it can be limited to only ‘it has got…legs’ with animal flashcards, ‘it’s big’ with school objects, ‘I like’ with food, prepositions, Present Continuous and what not.

Kids take over: the students can make up their own chains, either with the coursebooks flashcards or the mini-flashcards (always a good idea to have two or three sets of those for each topic, they can be reused throughout the course).

Chant it! This is the only variation here that I have not had a chance to use in the classroom but if you look at it from the right angle, all of a sudden, there is a lot of potential here: each chain has four pictures and each of them can become a separate verse. The kids can clap for the similar concepts and stomp for the odd one out…

It’s a good idea but it’s not my idea: the kids talk about the pictures and describe the odd one out but they have to go on until they guess the teacher’s original idea (probably better to write it down somewhere in order to be able to prove that we have not been cheating this time😊. If the appropriate topic has been chosen (such as, for instance, animals), this activity can go on for almost forever and the students will produce a terrifying amount of language. Once they learn to think outside of the box, this same activity can be used with all the seemingly less ‘appealing’ topics, too.

How many can you think of: a similar idea but realised slightly differently as students work with the exam materials but try to think of as many reasons to odd one of the pictures out…

Well, 27 activities…Not bad, not bad at all. I might be adding to this list in the future.

I hope you have found something useful here! And if you have used it in class, please let me know!

Happy teaching!

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.

Colourful Semantics in EFL?

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Have you got something that you could file under ‘professional interests‘ (or, more to the point in some cases, ‘professional obsessions’)? Mine is language production.

That is why I am always on the lookout for new ideas on how to trick my students into producing more and more. And more. Some of these ideas can be found on this blog, in the posts on the discourse clock, pairwork for pre-schoolers, using songs or cognitive skills-based activities to develop speaking. Today – a new post in the series.

It was probably one of those free-falling searches on Instagram, with no rhyme and reason, that got me to Saffira Mattfield’s (@onlinespeechie) Instagram post on Colourful Semantics. A very special moment, like when you stumble upon a proper toolbox with the screwdrivers and bolts and saws and monkey wrenches…Or, when in the supermarket, you wander into the baking aisle and, all of a sudden, all the professional decorations and ingredients right within your arm’s reach…This amazing and a very powerful feeling of: ‘I could do so much with it!’

Colourful Semantics

The approach was created in the 90s by a UK-based speech therapist Alison Bryan in order to help children develop their speaking skills especially as regards the use of full sentences, storytelling and so on.

The main idea behind colourful semantics is the colour-coding of parts of speech and the parts of the sentence and developing the habit of including all the necessary ‘ingredients’ in the simpler or more complex sentences. This is done with the use of the cards, like those in the photograph below. Subject (who?) is orange, verb (what doing) – yellow, object (what?) – green and, location (where?) – blue.

Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield

Children start with building simple sentences by using only two cards, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card) and ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and putting them next to each other on the template. Later on they move to constructing sentences made of three elements, for example ‘The girl’ (an orange card), ‘is painting’ (a yellow card) and ‘a balloon’ (a green card) or even four, by adding the blue card with the location, for example ‘in the park’. They not only learn to remember to include all the elements but they can also manipulate them physically. The sentence itself becomes less abstract since it all its key elements are represented visually.

If you are interested in all the details, please have a look at the bibliography.

Colourful Semantics cards from @onlinespeechie Saffira Mattfield

Colourful Semantics in EFL? Yes, please!

Colourful semantics perfectly resonates with everything that I have been doing in my lessons. Grammar structures and the format of the sentence are an abstract concept, beyond the grasp of pre-schoolers especially those who live in their own country, surrounded mostly by their mother tongue and not exposed to a sufficient amount of the target language. By using some kind of a visual representation of the parts of speech or the parts of the sentence, we make it more accessible to them and we enable production.

This visual representation can be realised through:

  • using gestures such as ‘pointing at yourself and sliding the hand along your body to draw attention to your clothes’ for ‘I am wearing’
  • using symbols such as ‘a heart’ for ‘I like’ and ‘a crossed heart’ for ‘I don’t like’
  • using flashcards such as ‘big’ and ‘cat’ to elicit a chunk ‘a big cat’

And…colours!

While making the sentences, students will be required to use all the required colours, ‘to tick all the boxes’, this way building a full sentence or a phrase. Of course, they might require more support from the teacher who will have to ensure that they did not skip any of the elements, but, the hope is that with time, including all the elements will become a habit.

Colourful semantics in the EFL classroom: how to get started

Step one: very easy

Get in touch with Saffira (@onlinespeechie) in order to get your own set of the ready-made cards. It is a perfect way of familiarising yourself with the colourful semantics in practice and to understand how it can be adapted to our EFL context. Although, of course, these cards can be used in the EFL classroom as they are, depending on the level of your students.

Step two: adapting the idea to your groups’ needs

The materials presented below were used with a group of the second level of four- and five-year-olds. Since they were still learning online, they were not using any real cards but only the visuals created with the Miro board. The unit was built around the topic of the house and included some furniture vocabulary, the prepositional phrases ‘the cat is on the sofa’ and some of the Present Continuous based on a story as well as a song.

The boards were used to practise these phrases were used later in the unit, when the student had become familiar with all the basic components. The main structure ‘The mice are having fun’ was introduced through a song. The first time the cards were used, the teacher was a very active participant, taking turns with all the kids to make sentences. In the following lessons, the teacher only modelled the activity and was responsible for moving the pictures around in accordance with the sentences the kids were producing.

The first set was designed to support the production of the sentences with the preposition ‘on’ which were later practised in a freer practise activity (‘My room’) whereas the second one focused on Present Continuous which was later reinforced in a storybook activity.

For the time being, a decision was made not to adapt the original colour-coding system and instead, a set of colours was assigned freely to each structure, to help the children associate them with each particular components of different structures, rather than with the whole system.

Reflection time

I have just started experimenting with this approach in my classes but the first steps in the world of Colourful Semantics have been more than exciting. This is definitely not the end of that adventure. Right now I am working on a set of cards that I could share with the parents of my students so that they could be printed, cut up and used at home.

Want to find out more? Start here:

Bryan, A. (1997) Colourful Semantics: thematic role therapy. In Chiat, S., Law, J. and Marshall, J. (Eds) Language Disorders in Children and Adults: Psycholinguistic approaches to therapy. London

Bolderson et al in (2011) Colourful Semantics: A Clinical Investigation. Child Language Teaching and Therapy October 2011 vol. 27 no. 3 344-353

Saffira Mattfiled @onlinespeechie

Colourful Semantics from London Speech Therapy

P.S. A request!

It is very simple.

I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.

Hence the survey.