Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Sentence Structure Fun

We have had so much fun building sentences lately! We've been playing learning sentence structure on the iPad with Rainbow Sentences from Mobile Education Tools. 


 According to their description, 
"Rainbow Sentences is designed to help students improve their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences by using color coded visual cues. The who, what, where, and why parts of sentences are color coded to help students recognize and understand how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure."

The easiest level starts with 2 color-coded groups of words. The student drags each group to its corresponding color line. There are many options to increase the difficulty, such as lengthening the sentence, separating the groups of words into single words, un-coloring the lines, and un-coloring the words. The hardest level contains 10 or more single words, all black, and black word lines. 


After the student finishes, the sentence is read back to him. He also has the opportunity to record the sentence and hear his own recording played back. This was my kids favorite part. After playing through a few sentences, Jake (6 yr) said, "I want to hear the boy say it." He had no idea that he was hearing his own voice! He wouldn't even believe me that it was him until I had him record something funny instead of the sentence. Now, every time he and Alyssa (4 yr) play it, they record such silly things along with the actual sentence. There is always much giggling. They have fun while learning. Is that allowed???

The student also earns puzzle pieces as he progresses. Jake likes figuring out what the picture is with only a piece or two. He also likes showing his newborn baby brother the colorful pictures and recording him silly messages, like the one where he goo-goo gaa-gaa-ed then inform me, "I don't think he understood."

The app costs $7.99 and is recommended for ages 3-10. Both my kids really liked this. And I think there may be a typo. Instead of ages 3 through 10, it's supposed to be age 3 times 10, because even at 30 years old, I enjoyed playing the hardest level. Maybe it's because I have an English major; maybe it's the word-puzzle lover in me. Maybe it's just a good app.



You can find more reviews of Rainbow Sentences and Story Builder (another Mobile Education Tools app) on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog.

   
* Disclaimer - I received this product in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

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