Author: Sentopiary Staff
The new sentence-building app Sentopiary has been released for iPads, with a special Sentopiary Lite version available for free. Aimed at elementary and middle school students, the app takes a playful attitude to breaking sentences down into their core components: a key task in understanding how to communicate ideas successfully.
In a colorful, engaging design interface, students can work through various levels of difficulty to create sentences or can challenge themselves with a series of increasingly difficult test sentences. Sentopiary was designed with the U.S. core curriculum standards in mind and aligns well with vocabulary and grammar objectives at each grade level.
In a colorful, engaging design interface, students can work through various levels of difficulty to create sentences or can challenge themselves with a series of increasingly difficult test sentences. Sentopiary was designed with the U.S. core curriculum standards in mind and aligns well with vocabulary and grammar objectives at each grade level.
The app comes with a create mode, where students can build their own sentences and indicate which words are nouns, pronouns, verbs, articles, adverbs and adjectives. A challenge mode is also available to test how well you can identify various parts of a sentence.
Sentopiary tells us that one of the unique aspects of the design has been to involve students and teachers in the process as part of a user-designed approach. The app developer team met with a class of elementary students to test the app, and also gave beta versions to education technology integration specialists and English teachers to trial.
The Sentopiary team told us the turning point for the classroom activity came when students started to create grammatically-correct, silly sentences along the lines of the example included in the app: "The intelligent penguins invaded the capital". In classroom activities, this led to students getting more engaged as they tried to create a silly example for themselves. It is an approach that seems to have ignited end users as well, with one review on the app store from a grandfather who said "my grand kids (K - 4) like the gentle, goofy fun of building silly sentences!"
A Vimeo video channel shows the app in use, while the Sentopiary website has more details on the alignment with English curriculum standards.
The Sentopiary team told us the turning point for the classroom activity came when students started to create grammatically-correct, silly sentences along the lines of the example included in the app: "The intelligent penguins invaded the capital". In classroom activities, this led to students getting more engaged as they tried to create a silly example for themselves. It is an approach that seems to have ignited end users as well, with one review on the app store from a grandfather who said "my grand kids (K - 4) like the gentle, goofy fun of building silly sentences!"
A Vimeo video channel shows the app in use, while the Sentopiary website has more details on the alignment with English curriculum standards.
