SentenceBuilder™ for iPad - A Communication Development App

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

Sentence Builder is a communication development app for students learning to construct sentences. This app is useful for students who are working on increasing the number of words used in verbal sentences in addition to those who are developing sentence writing skills. Sentence Builder displays a picture and invites the student to make a four-word sentence about that picture. To help the student do that, this app features what the developer calls a multi-wheel picker. Imagine a slot machine with four columns of words that the user can move up and down independently to select the correct word.

The base app includes 100 pictures along with a multi-wheel picker customized with words to create a sentence about each picture.

The app contains three levels of difficulty. In Level 1, the student has to make choices for two of the words in the sentence and the app provides the other two. Students choose from a field of three for each word. In Level 2, the student chooses three words to build the sentence from fields of three to five choices. In Level 3, students choose three words from a field of five for each word. Level difficulty appears to be controlled completely by the adult and does not require the student to achieve advancement.

The Settings option allows the user to create one or more profiles for students. Options that can be controlled include “Correct Answer Reinforcement,” “Correct Answer Animations,” “Audio Instructions,” and the ability to purchase additional picture/sentence modules geared toward older teen users. Statistics are kept on each student to track progress.

What Diane Liked

Sentence Builder is in a group of apps often called Game Changers. As a mom of a seven-year-old child with special needs, I’m constantly looking for tools that allow my daughter to manage her challenges so that she can develop age-typical skills. At this point, she is learning to write letters and words, but it takes her longer to accomplish the task.

From a skill’s perspective, we are many months away from being able to easily form and write a sentence. By making the words easily accessible through the multi-wheel picker, Sentence Builder allows our daughter to develop and practice the cognitive abilities needed for sentence creation. This allows her to practice the same skills as her peers and helps minimize the impact of a hand-writing delay on her cognitive development. Our hope is that as her handwriting improves, the sentence formation strategies she has developed from Sentence Builder will already be in place, and she will be better able to keep up academically with her peers.

We are also using Sentence Builder Teen for our highly-creative 12-year-old, who has ideas far bigger than her grammar mechanics. As with many teens, the majority of her written communication is accomplished through texting. We are using Sentence Builder to help her develop and practice simple sentence patterns that she can use on essay questions and more formal writing assignments. Sentence Builder Teen provides an easy way for her to drill through the simple sentence patterns, hopefully making them more natural and allowing her to express her ideas more clearly.

Sentence Builder is not a game, and it is not designed to be used alone by a young child. We do short intervals of work with the app, and then my daughters can play one of the fun games or read an interactive book. Using Sentence Builder does require commitment and time from the adult. However, the rewards for that commitment are game changing for children who need to develop sentence writing skills.

Suggested Enhancement

With an adult’s help in navigating, this app is extremely powerful as is. Because we are regular users, our family does have a wish list for a couple of items. It would be nice to have two introductory levels before the current Level 1 difficulty.

Since my daughter is just learning to write sentences, it would be great to be able to start with simple two-word, subject-verb sentences (For example, “Boy runs.” “Girl sings.”) That would help reinforce the idea of what a sentence is and would allow many more students the opportunity to start at their current level. From there, it would be great to be able to progress to three-word sentences. (For example, “The boy sings.” “A girl runs.”) This would provide a nice foundation for our youngest daughter and would have helped her succeed and understand what the app was asking her to do a little quicker.

Also, when the student submits the sentence for approval, it would be great to get feedback on the words that are correct. That way the student doesn’t have to start completely over and can just concentrate on fixing the words that aren’t correct.

Overall

Sentence Builder is a remarkable communication development app that, with the support of an adult, offers students who are overcoming challenges in handwriting and/or increasing verbal sentence length a way to develop and practice age-typical sentence creation skills.