By Glessner, Judy

By Glessner, Judy

RAINBOWing

What is Rainbowing?

Rainbowing is the color coding of sentences in such a way that sentence structure and parts of speech (nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, etc.) are easier to learn and recognize. Besides making English more fun, this will enable students to construct awesome sentences in their writing!

Eight colors are used in Rainbowing. First, yellow is used to mark “bridges” that connect. Next, purple marks the conjunctions. Then things start to get more complicated! Orange marks phrases, everything from prepositions to verbals and appositives. Blue starts with marking nouns and pronouns with squiggly lines, and ends with a solid blue line under the subject. Green is next. It locates the predicate, the main verb, either helping, linking or action. Now for red, a challenging color. With red, clauses are marked and sentence type and sentence patterns are identified. Brown can also be tricky. Brown marks the direct objects and indirect objects. Last, but not least, is black. Black will indicate the colorful parts! It will mark the location of adjectives, adverbs, and interjections.

After attending a workshop by Judy Henry, the creator of Rainbowing, I have been excited to start using the process in my 4th and 5th grade classrooms to replace the use of worksheets to teach English and writing. We started doing our “rainbowing” on sentences after Christmas break and students (and teacher) seem to be catching on and enjoying it!

Rainbowing