Rainbow Sentences app for iPad

Posted on: by Kyle | 25 Comments

$7.99 on the iTunes 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.

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

  • 165 images to create sentence from
  • Intuitive drag and drop to create sentences
  • Words are spoken as they are being dragged for non readers
  • Words can be color coded for added visual support
  • Word groups can be selected to simplify sentence construction
  • 6 levels of sentence complexity
  • Pictograph lessons to help students learn proper sentence construction
  • Record feature allows students to record sentences in their own voice
  • Save and email recorded sentences
  • Students earn puzzle pieces during play to encourage continued play
  • Puzzles come to life once level is complete

Watch the video tutorial here…

For more information, or to purchase a copy,  please visit the iTunes Store..