Rainbow Sentences – Teach Students How to Build Sentences

Reviewed by Diane – With dual BAs in English and Computer Science and a Master’s in Communications from Northwestern University, Diane’s professional background includes Instructional Design, Human Factors Testing, Training and Marketing. She has authored a children’s book that explored how a computer works and has provided training services for Preschool through High School students. Currently Diane is a full-time mom to 3 young people ages 7 through 16.

Details

Rainbow Sentences uses color-coding, interactivity, and customization to teach students how to build sentences. The app provides a picture, a jumbled sentence, and color-coded lines that guide the student in dragging the correct word or phrase into its position in the sentence. The app includes 168 different pictures and sentences along with a robust Settings menu that allows parents and teachers to customize the app to best meet the needs of the student. Options that can be controlled in the Settings menu include

· muting the audio instructions and correct answer reinforcement

· choosing from three levels of complexity. Level 1 provides simpler sentences with subject and verb phrases. Level 2 adds prepositional phrases that provide information on where the action in the sentence is taking place. Level 3 includes all the same information as level 2 and adds a prepositional phrase that explains why the action is being done.

· determining if you want the students to record themselves reading the correct sentence

· choosing whether you want to use the color coding to guide sentence building (great for beginning students) or use a single color for either the guide lines, the words, or both. These options allow the app to meet the students’ needs even as their skills develop.

· determining if the student should build a sentence a word at a time (for more advanced students) or by parts of speech phrases (for beginning students learning word relationships)

Multiple accounts can be created for different students. The customization of this app is extremely user friendly and makes it adaptable for different and developing skill levels. The student or user can select an option to provide instructions on how to build the sentence.

When students build five sentences correctly on the first try, they receive a puzzle piece as a reward. A short animation plays when the puzzle is completed.

An Archives option allows students to save recordings of their sentences. When the recording is played back, it includes a copy of the original picture along with the audio recording made by the student. An option on this menu allows the user to share the audio and picture through email. A Stats option displays information on students’ progress. These stats can be emailed as well, making this a great system for teachers and therapists.

What Diane Liked

Rainbow Sentences was created by Mobile Education Store, the same developer who created Sentence Builder. The difference between these two apps is that Sentence Builder puts more emphasis on word selection while Rainbow Sentences focuses on the role the word plays and its part of speech in the sentence. The apps make a nice complement to each other and the different approaches provide a nice change of pace that helped keep my daughter’s interest.

Rainbow Sentences is a “download and play” app with very little learning curve or set-up required from the user. The color-coding is intuitive for students, and the recording option not only motivates my daughter, but it also gives her practice speaking.

The app worked flawlessly, with no technical bugs encountered during several intensive testing sessions.

The graphics and lay-out of the app are colorful and appealing.

Suggested Enhancement

All of the customization allows the user to modify the app to best meet students’ needs. This basically puts the user in charge of their own enhancements and provides a simple to use interface for that purpose.

Overall

With its flexible customization, visual color-coding, and an intuitive user interface, Rainbow Sentences is a valuable tool in teaching students parts of speech and how to build grammatically correct sentences.

Screenshots

Learn More

To learn more about this app, you can check the complete features of Rainbow Sentences or Download it below.

Developer provided promo codes to facilitate the review.