*App Review Thursday*

Welcome back to App Review Thursday!

Today’s app review features “Rainbow Sentences” by Mobile Education Store. 

This app is available in the iTunes Store for $7.99.

The following excerpt, taken from the Mobile Education Store website, describes Rainbow Sentences: 

“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.

Students will learn how to recognize the parts of sentences such as nouns, verbs, and prepositions, improve their understanding of how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure. Students have the opportunity to record their sentences in their own voice to improve their receptive and expressive language skills.

Research indicates that color coding can assist in reading instruction and language comprehension, and augmentative communication systems have long incorporated color coding to build a sense of conceptual organization for their users.  Studies also show that children with language and learning disabilities and children with autism spectrum disorder benefit from multi-sensory instructional strategies. Rainbow Sentences draws on these benefits associated with color and verbal language learning, and also incorporates multi-sensory teaching strategies by providing students with a hands on sentence construction experience that enables them to integrate the printed word with the spoken word as they manipulate words on the screen to match the picture presented.

The built in color coding in Rainbow Sentences is supportive of a noun phrase/verb phrase sentence structure with more advanced levels including a modifying phrase and a rationale clause.  Sentences are color coded for these specific structural phrases (as opposed to individual parts of speech) in order to help students build an understanding for the WH elements (specifically the who, what, where and why) within a sentence.  Educators are free to establish their own color scheme for these underlying phrase structures, enabling them to work within a modified version of the established color coding systems with which their students may be familiar.

Rainbow Sentences includes a playback button for students to check the accuracy of the sentences they have created, as well as record and play options that enable them to read and listen to the sentence they have just created in their own voice.  These features provide additional opportunities for the integration of visual, verbal and auditory information, and also help students develop improved self-monitoring skills for the content of what they are reading and the accuracy with which they are reading it.

Prior to its release in January of 2012, Rainbow Sentences was tested by 9 speech language pathologists over a period of four months in various educational settings.  These clinicians reported noticeable improvement in their students’ understanding and use of sentence structure, as well as positive gains in their students’ reading confidence and speech production. Over time, these and other educators working with students in both special education and regular education settings have reported that Rainbow Sentences has led to measurable gains across a wide array of targeted skills in their students’ speech/language and reading development.

Rainbow Sentences offers a unique environment for improving a student’s ability to create grammatically correct sentences.”

Features:

This app is designed for readers but can be adjusted with a little creativity by parents and therapists by targeting use of the auditory portion of this app. Our patients love the ‘playback’ option when they get to record their sentences. It’s great for auditory feedback and generalization of skills. 

Are you using the Rainbow Sentences app? Leave a comment and let us know what you think about it!

Thanks for stopping by!

CTG Austin