Fun with Verbs and Sentences by Hamaguchi Apps is a sentence building and verb tense app that is designed to visually show left to right sentence building and sequence the parts of a sentence in the right order.
The full version of the app allows for 75 users and groups.
The SETTINGS menu offers a number of options to choose from:
Settings
Activities
Build a Sentence & Animation
- Choose your subject: There are three character choices in this app: a boy, a girl, and a bear.
- Choose your verb: Choose something for the subject to do.
- Choose your object or prepositional phrase
Choose your subject
Choose your verb
Choose object
The narrator voices each part of the sentence slowly, as the circles flip around, one at a time, to reveal the associated pictures: “The girl…is washing…the car.”
The animation shows the sentence that was created
The child is asked, “What is happening? Tell me the whole sentence.”
The circles below can be tapped to show the associated pictures or tapped again to hear the associated audio.
Watch & Say (recording only)
An animation is shown and the child is prompted by the words “what is happening?” The child can touch the circles for further prompts.
Sentence Type
The following sentence types can be selected for practice.
- Verb
- Subject + Verb
- Subject + Verb + Object
- Subject + Verb + Prepositional Phrase
- Random
Subject choices can be limited to using the pronouns he/she or using the a determiner (the) + noun
Track Progress
- On/off
- Display scores on/off
Results can be emailed, saved or printed.
Verbs
There are 39 verbs in the app. They can be randomly selected, or custom selected.
- Present ing form
- Past Regular
- Past irregular
- Random
Cueing
- Visual Support
- Sentence is modeled by narrator before animation
Bubble Game
- This basic motivational game can be used adjusted to pop up after 1,3, 5 or 10 questions.
The child picks an object to ‘hide’ and he must then pop the bubbles in order to find the object.
What I like:
- The app has really been successful in achieving what it purports to do.
- Animation relevant and displays the tense. The animation can be paused by touching the bottom of the screen. This allows you to discuss the animation with the child and you can incorporate future tense into the discussion.
- Record feature and playback with “check” feature allows the student to compare his response with the correct target response
- The option to use written information
- Watch and Say can be used to generate further language and I have used it very successfully to target written sentence construction in older children.
What I would like:
- Sometimes the definite object /the/ is used before the noun and sometimes the indefinite object /a/ is used before the noun. The children that have difficulty with this concept found this very confusing and I would like this to be more consistent.
- Settings cannot be changed within a session, so it becomes a little bit fiddly to adjust if you need to change the level.
- Bubble game is a bit simplistic and not very motivating.
Overall, I have found Fun with Verbs & Sentences a versatile and engaging app that is useful in targeting numerous language skills.
The app is available on the App store for $15.99
There is also a lite version which is for single users at $0.99
A copy of “Fun with Verbs & Sentences” was provided to me for review. All opinions are my own.
