Schoolhouse Crew: Rainbow Sentences by Mobile Education Store

The MainMost is the most technologically-savvy person I know.  He really gets into gadgets.  When he  brought home his iPad last year, the kids were excited to have a turn to try it out.  I knew that it would be a lot of fun for the entire family but I didn't realize how well it would fit into our daily life.  It didn't take long though before I could see that it was a going to be a neat gadget to add to our homeschool environment.  He started showing me all of the really neat educational apps and I was sold.

We've been reviewing a great new app by Mobile Education Store called Rainbow Sentences.  It has been an excellent resource for the Princess as we work on sentence structure and understanding the parts of speech.  Here's how Mobile Education Store explains Rainbow Sentences:

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. 

Designed to help your students improve their sentence structure skills, Rainbow Sentences offers something for all learning styles.  Children can see, hear and interact with the various components of the app -- learning as they play.  Visual clues (color-coded words) are used in constructing grammatically correct sentences.  Listening skills are improved when the words are read aloud as students move the various parts of the sentences into place.  And once students complete the sentences correctly, they are prompted to read the sentence aloud for themselves.  This reading is recorded and students play it back to hear themselves read.  The Princess thinks this is the best part of all -- and it is working wonders on her ability to read with expression.  {We were sitting together as she worked through a lesson today and she did not like how her voice sounded when the recording was played back for her.  She said, "Mom, I sound boring!  I need to do that again."  Neat, huh?  From there on out, her sentences were FULL of expression.  You've got to love a drama queen.}

With 3 levels of sentence complexity, Rainbow Sentences helps students to greatly improve their sentence-building skills.  Each level has 55 sentences.  I had the Princess begin at the very beginning (Level 1) and at first she thought it was "way easy, Mom" but it didn't take long until she was feeling the challenge.  She enjoyed collecting puzzle pieces as she worked through the individual lessons -- a built in reward for a job well done -- and seeing the pictures come to life.  I especially liked that I could adjust all of the settings in order to challenge her even more.  For example, I turned off the color coding of the words and she had to figure out where the words fit to make a good sentence.  When she had a bit of trouble with that, there was a video to watch to explain it to her and she was continually offered positive reinforcement as she learned.

The Princess is much like the MainMost.  She really gets into gadgets, too.  She enjoyed emailing her recorded sentences to me and doing school on the iPad was a great motivator for getting work done.  I know we'll be using Rainbow Sentences all summer long and I recommend you trying it with your children as well.

Mobile Education Store wants to help kids connect the dots -- and Rainbow Sentences did just that for my Princess.  You can purchase the Rainbow Sentences app through iTunes for $7.99.  For even more information, please check out this video tutorial on YouTube:

~~Disclaimer:  I was given the opportunity to use Rainbow Sentences by Mobile Education Store as a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew.  The opinions stated are mine and mine alone.  I was not paid to share my thoughts and feelings with you.  I received the app in exchange for my honest review. You can check out the Crew Review and see what other members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew thought of  Rainbow Sentences (and Storybuilder)  HERE.~ Pin It Now!