Tuesday, June 12, 2012

TOS Review - Rainbow Sentences App for the iPad

This is the first time I have had the  opportunity of reviewing an app.  Since my iPad and me (and Julianna - she wants to use it almost as much as I do) are joined at the hip, I was excited to give this new program a try.  Rainbow Sentences is the newest educational app offered by Mobile Educational Store.  
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.

My musings:
Rainbow Sentences is simple to use and the color coding makes it easy to identify the who, what, where, why of the sentence. We've lightly touched grammar this year: nouns, verbs, etc. (mostly by completing Mad Libs - Ha!), but haven't focused on sentence structure. This app was a good way for Julianna to get exposure to building correct sentences without knowing she was doing it. Plus, the sentences (and pictures that went with them) were usually silly (i.e. "The bear is reading" that went along with a picture of a bear drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.  Of course, she recording it as, "The bear is drinking icky, stinky coffee and reading."), so she enjoyed that. With each correct sentence created, the student earns a puzzle piece that, when completed, is an animated picture. This was not motivating to Julianna at all. Some type of game would have been better. You have the option to record (and save) the student reading the sentences for playback. She loved this. Of course, if she read the sentence correctly (which she sometimes did, with her own vocal characters added), but most of the time she made up her own narration to go along with the silly picture. We didn't make it through many levels, but it's definitely an app we'll continue to explore.


Julianna's musings:
"I think the pictures are kinda silly and I like to record whatever I want."

Details:  Rainbow Sentences can be downloaded from iTunes for $7.99.

Disclaimer:  As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, I received a copy of the Rainbow Sentences app for the iPad in exchange for my honest review.  No other compensation was received.

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