Last year I posted a blog about the benefits of using Clicker 8 for the colourful semantics.
“Colourful Semantics is an approach used to teach children about sentence building and sentence structure. Different parts of a sentence, such as the verbs, nouns and adjectives, are colour coded. The sentence cues of Who? What doing? What? Where? can be used alongside a visual stimulus.” You can read more about my previous blog here.
At a recent visit for a client, I was excited to explore Clicker’s role in supporting the development of using this strategy.
Clicker itself has different writing grids that can be used. I have found the Connect Set to be the most appropriate.
There are several reasons I have started to prefer the Connect set:
Firstly, it feels most familiar to printed resources.
When using colourful semantics as a strategy, it is common to organise your colour-coded vocabulary into your ‘Who?’, ‘What doing?’, ‘What?’, ‘Where?’ categories.
Moving from having a guided order with real, tangible resources to then using a computer makes this concept for learners, and the people supporting them, easier to grasp.
Secondly, it is easier to navigate as the ‘teacher’ when creating resources.
I like to create a Connect Set as a template to help me. I place the colour-coded vocabulary in guided order and then duplicate a few more sets.
Thirdly, I like the ability to make the buttons look more like the symbols I would have made.
When clicking on a Cluster, you can tick ‘Maximise Height’ so that the image appears above the text. You can have up to 4 words/buttons in each cluster.
Lastly, there are also options to place the Connect Set in ‘Guided Order’.
By selecting this, it greys out the other words until the first is selected.
Leave this un-ticked and you can select any of the vocabulary.
Other things I have reflected on since my last post are Keywords. You may have noticed that I have used keywords on each button and no capital letters. Determiners, such as the/a, and auxiliary verbs, such as is/are, have been omitted. You may of course change this to suit your learners.
One benefit of omitting them means that picturising the words in one go, rather than individually, is much easier. Do this when editing the Connect Set from the drop down menu.
I hope this blog will help you in creating your own Colourful Semantics Connect Sets. My approach for this is always evolving as I learn new things with Clicker. Please do share any hints, tips and success stories.
