by Ryan Knoblauch
Do you remember the Fokes Sentence Builder?  Okay, I’m not THAT old, but we did have one buried in our clinic’s closet in college.  The box didn’t look fancy and when you opened it up it was equally unimpressive.  If you took the time, however, to actually read the book and figure out how the little boxes worked, it was a fantastic tool for sentence writing.  Fast forward 10 or so years (okay, I am starting to get older), as I was cleaning out another closet, low and behold, what did I find?  The Fokes Sentence Builder.  Its colorful boxes and sentence markers were all intact.  I hit the SLP jackpot!  Okay, so some of us get a little bit excited.  These things are hard to come by.  I digress.   So, what’s the Fokes Sentence Builder?  The Fokes Sentence Builder is a big box with six smaller boxes inside with hundreds of picture (and some words) cards inside that.  Joann Foke’s developed a systematic approach to teaching students how to construct sentences for readers and non-readers.
So that brings us to present time (by the way, the Fokes Sentence Builder came out the same year I was born–1976).  Now we have all of these gadgets and advances that give us instant access to materials.  Many speech therapists continue to use the traditional method of using paper and pencil tasks or flashcards with students as manipulatives to teach sentence writing (structure).  Believe me, I still like to use these, but now that some of us are technology crazy (me), I like to venture out by using the SMART Board, computer, and iPad to teach the same concepts.  What would be great?  …if there was a Fokes Sentence Builder app.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is not.

There are, however, lots of other similar apps and programs out there that can do the same thing.  So, I thought I’d share the 21st century versions of the Fokes Sentence Builder with you.
iPad Apps That Are Similar to the Fokes Sentence Builder
This app allows users to practice creating grammatically correct sentences by building them from word wheels.  The app features 100 pictures and also keeps statistics to show progress.
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