Great tool for building grammar and speaking skills
Community Review for SentenceBuilder for iPad
My Take
The basic structure is a great idea and implementation is spot on. Although overall it is not super visually appealing and kids will eventually tire of the repetition. The animations are wonky, but in an endearing way (at least for me and my students). The levels are great and work well to scaffold kids slowly up to more difficult sentences. It would be nice to have an option where kids just type in the correct answer to add difficulty. I do love that after the sentences are correct their is a audible reading of the sentence. When students get it wrong, it just says "you'll get it next time" it'd be nice if they said the sentence in the wrong order so students can start hearing the difference between right and wrong answers. It is a tool that is mostly for lower level students, or lower level grades (k-3), it could go higher if they added in some vocab like "preposition" or "adverb" explicitly with the prompts and pushed into the naming of the structures they are teaching. Another cool feature would be to allow you to choose more specific things you want students to focus on, like a section for student to JUST work on prepositions. Overall it really is a quick and easy tool for helping kids with the basic grammar and structure of sentences.
How I Use It
I use it for independent practice for students. It works great, except when a student is stuck, at that point there is no scaffolding or help to get them there, they just guess until it is right. If a student is borderline with sentence structure though, it is an excellent tool. It especially helped students with language gaps to shore up their usage of prepositions and verbs like "are vs. is" or "he vs. his". As an extension, I had students take the sentences and expand on them, writing 3 more sentences about the picture, which helped to push vocab and engagement.