Shake-a-Phrase is a fun iPad app for elementary school and middle school students to use to start stories and practice recognizing parts of speech. Shake-a-Phrase has three basic modes; shake it, story starter, and quiz mode. Each mode has five themes; animals, monsters, fairytales, sports, and random. In “shake it” mode students shake their iPads to have complete, but random sentences appear on their screens. The “story starter” mode presents students with a new random story prompt each time they shake their iPads. In both of these modes students can favorite sentences and prompts to refer to later. Shake-a-Phrase’s quiz mode presents students with random sentences in which they have to identify nouns, adjectives, verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions.
Students will enjoy using Shake-a-Phrase, in part, because of the physical act of shaking their iPads to start a story. They’ll also enjoy it because of the fun sentences that are generated by the app. If you only have one iPad in your classroom, consider using Shake-a-Phrase as a story prompt generator. Each you use it you could have a different student take a turn shaking the iPad. Just make sure you have a good case on that iPad first.
Shake-a-Phrase is currently priced at $1.99 USD.