Sentence Makers

[Alant]

circa 1971/1972
primary school teaching aid. Consisted of a big (orange?) cardboard folder (about the size of a ring binder), that contained a load of words on small pieces of toughened paper. I'm sure there was a holder (a bit like the ones in Scrabble) that was used to build up sentences using the words.

[Star Attraction]

Re: Sentence Makers

We had those when I started primary school September 1976, when I was in what would now be called the reception year. The folder was indeed orange, with lots of words inside, it was made by Longman (book publisher) and titled "my sentence maker".

[elca67]

Re: Sentence Makers

OMG! I can't believe other people remember these. I thought I was the only one. I was talking to someone today about them and then found this forum. I believe they helped me to read better and I can remember going to another school with my teachers to show them how it worked. Whatever happened to them.

[Sim]

Always wondered what happened to those big orange sentence makers …I have such vivid memories of using them in my primary school …would love to find one..if anyone has one to sell or knows where to find an original that would be amazing!

[George 1978]

We had something called "Breakthrough" in around 1985-1986, and it consisted of mostly verbs, adjectives and familiar nouns on small cards, some green stands to put the words on, and we were supposed to make sentences with them that way.

[Arran]

There was some software for the BBC computer back in the 1980s that enabled the user to create sentences by choosing whether a word is a noun / verb / adjective but you couldn't choose the word itself. The software then (randomly?) picked words out of a database. The resulting sentences were often very humorous and nonsensical, despite being grammatically correct.

[beccabear67]

One of the first sentences I learned in French was to say "My name is Hector, I am a beef (boeuf, or bull I suppose)". I wonder if there was a similar mind behind that course?

[Arran]

I asked a friend about the sentence making software but he didn't know what it was called. He said it generated sentences like My dad's new car jumped down the toilet or The hairy purple kettle started world war 3 with the gumpy old remote control.

He then mentioned how his teacher removed toilet from the database of words, and the software still generated sentences with toilet in them!

[80sChav]

Oh I thought this was going to lead to say you start with, say Alice had a Budgie that is Green - then somebody adds his/her cage is in a conseveratory and so on until you run out of things to add (or others do) rather