Week 1: The Fitzgerald Key

I have decided to create my "Word Wall" for 2014 using the Fitzgerald Key (www.bridges-canada.com).  Let me describe what this means, and my personal rationale for using it based on my 15 years of experience as a speech-language pathologist who has worked with a wide variety of clientele.  It is a system that uses color coding based upon parts of speech.  Here is the assignment of colors:

Yellow: people
Green: actions
Purple: places
Orange: nouns
Blue: describing words
Red: social vocabulary
White: other

The reason that I lean towards the use of the Fitzgerald Key for many aspects of language and literacy learning and development is that it is very visual in nature. I, myself, am a very visual and kinesthetic learner. I learn best when I can see the difference in something or tactically manipulate something.  When words are placed on colored cards, such as the index cards available at many stores, children have the opportunity to move words around to make different sentence structures that they may not otherwise discover.  It is also a useful professional tool to help teach how to create and generate grammatically correct sentences.

In the area of augmentative and alternative communication, many manufacturers are going to a color-coded system to help users distinguish words from one another.  People who use and rely on AAC systems are often reliant upon their visual sense for communication purposes.  Why not reinforce this through language instruction techniques that mimic similar strategies.

As I stated in my previous post the theme for January will be "Football" since there will be many playoff games occurring.  The 6 words that have been added to my "Word Wall" this week include:

Yellow:  He
Green:    Kick
Orange:  Ball
Purple:   Field
Blue:      Cold
Pink:      Yeah!

How many sentences, phrases, or comments can you or your child come up with using these 6 words?  Yes you can use all forms of the action words (kick, kicks, kicking, kicked).

Happy Communicating!