Grammaropolis Review
I grew up watching School House Rock and singing “Conjunction Junction what’s your function? Hookin’ up words and letters and phrases” with Saturday morning cartoons. While not many primary school age kids today know those songs, I’ll bet many of them recognize Grammaropolis phrases like “Noun town what’s that sound, a person, place or thing is found in noun town. “ by Dr. Noize.
Grammaropolis animates the parts of speech giving them personalities based on the roles they play in a sentence. Each part of speech has its own neighborhood, and within that neighborhood is a map that combines traditional grammar instruction and quizzes with award-winning songs, books, and videos.
I love the way the map is used to lead you on an educational journey. Touch the symbols to access the introduction, watch the music video, watch a quick video, read the book or take quizzes.
The first stop on the journey is a music video that introduces the overall concept and then breaks it down to the individual elements. I did the review of Noun Town, so after teaching that a noun is a person. place, or thing, it breaks it down as: common, proper, concrete, abstract, compound, and collective nouns. There is never a lecturing environment but always an atmosphere of fun and entertainment.
Even the quizzes are non-threatening. All the questions are multiple choice and require thinking about what you learned. You may be asked to identify the noun in a sentence, or determine if there are any nouns in the sentence (a tricky skip ahead to pronouns here). Once you complete the entire route and pass a final quiz you earn a badge of honor.
Nouns is included with the free download of the app but Grammaropolis has characters representing verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns conjunction, prepositions and interjections. These are available as in app purchases.
There’s just something about a catchy beat that helps us remember things and Grammaropolis has hit on the key to making the parts of speech stick with you.
Price when Reviewed: Free
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.
Seller: Grammaropolis LLC © 2012 Grammaropolis LLC
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this app for review purposes.
