Fun with Verbs and Sentences: by Patti Hamaguchi. When I review apps, I
look for its ease of overall use, the way it approaches therapy for its
targeted area, how it meets the goal, the fun and interest value for children,
the level of interactivity and the usefulness for the speech pathologist or how
much easier it makes our lives. This one is another Hamaguchi home run.
Fun with Verbs and Sentences focuses on the present progressive “is” and regular and irregular past tenses that can be learned and practiced at three levels, called sentence types: verbs only, subject + verb, subject + verb + object, subject + verb + prepositional phrase or random selection of all the preceding. One also is offered the subject choices of pronouns he/she or nouns.
To play, the child selects the “who,” by tapping one of three characters,
a boy, girl or bear, to demonstrate the actions. Next, the child
selects one of three actions displayed. If the subject + verb + object or subject
+ verb + prepositional phrase sentence types was chosen the child chooses one of three objects or places. For each selection tapped, the
narrator names the word. Each who, what and where selection then drops to the bottom
of the screen and is embedded in a colored circle. These circles can be used as reinforcement later. On the next screen the student's selections come together to demonstrate the verb. At the bottom of the animation screen are the three colored circles. Tap once on a circle on the bottom of the screen and the embedded icon reappears. Tap again and the narrator names the picture. A secondary learning
experience occurs for who and what comprehension. When
the narrator asks the child to select the who, and what she says, “Who will be
in it,” “What do you want the ____to do?” The pictures and animations for this
app are excellent. The opportunity for the child to use the verbs occurs when student taps the
microphone to record her sentence.
One might wonder, as I did, how well the animations portray the present,
on-going movement, versus the past, a completed action, for the same verb. I
was pleased to see the app handle this well. The animation for the present
tense repeats itself until the Done button is tapped. The animation for the
past tense occurs only once.
Data collection takes place when the child records her phrase. To the left of the animation are three egg
shaped colors. The top contains the word Subject, the second the word Verb and
the third, “Prep. Phrase.” The adult taps the part of speech correctly said by
the child. The score is shown below the shape as the number correct out of the
number presented and in percentage. At the bottom is the “Overall Sentence
Score.” The database for this app allows for 75 users to be tracked, individually
or as part of a group.
The Settings screen allows
one to select the Activities (Build a Sentence + Animation) or Watch & Say
(recording page only) and if the activity automatically or manually moves to
the next screen, Sentence Type), Track Progress, Verbs, the type of Cueing
(visual or support and/or narration) and the frequency of the reward called the
Bubble Game (the child taps bubbles until he/she finds a prize). One can turn
text, recording and narration on or off as well. One can customize the verbs to be
presented. However, Ms. Hamaguchi explained, “There needs to be at least three
selected if you are in the ‘Build a Sentence’ mode because that is how the game
is played. If you go into the other activity, there is no constraint in terms
of having a minimum of choices and it will show whichever ones you want to
practice. So if you want to show animations of 'paint,' select 'paint' and you can practice that—past or present tense. That is the
customization.” The presentation of one or two verbs, comes with a fun animation
of subjects demonstrating the action.
The narration is excellent for the most part. However, when the
narrator said the sentence in its entirety, after clearly naming each picture associated
with the circle, it was said quickly and at times was a bit garbled. Sometimes the verb
was modeled using the whole word “is” and sometimes in the contracted form. This could be problematic for a
child having difficulty with verb construction.
There are 39 verbs offered in this app as well as 266 well-done
animations.
Ages: 2-5
Rating: +++++
Developer's website: www.hamaguchiapps.com
Cost: $15.99, $.99 for the Lite Version
