Junior Learning JL644 Sentences Cubes, Multicolor

I use these ALLLLLLLL the time in my Occupational Therapy sessions to work on handwriting with students in a school based setting. I have students roll the dice and then we sequence the sentence. I guide them through correctly sequencing the sentence using phrases like, "Which word has a capital letter? This will be the first word in our sentence." As well as, "What comes at the end of our sentence? That's right, we need punctuation!" Having them sequence the sentence this way helps me to work on writing conventions that will carry over into the classroom. I usually omit the adverb dice as my students have a hard time placing it in the correct sequence within the sentence. My focus is the actual handwriting, not grammar. I love these dice because they allow me to work on different components of handwriting (pencil grip, letter formation, line orientation, word/letter spacing, appropriate letter sizing, etc) without having to come up with a sentence or have students come up with a sentence. Many times, the students I work with have a hard time developing a sentence at all or coming up with one that makes sense. In addition, using the dice also helps me eliminate students needing to spell the words. They can copy the sentence directly from the dice or I can hide them if I want to work on memory by recalling what the sentence says. Copying from the dice allows us to focus on the actual handwriting rather than phonics or spelling. Bonus: My students love that we can make the sentences silly by switching the nouns. For example: "The bus runs around our dad." They get a kick out of envisioning a bus running around their dad. The dice have held up to regular handling, cleaning, dropping, and rolling for about 2 years. These sentence dice are always in my bag and have been a regularly used tool. I travel to 7 different schools every week so I'm very conscious about what I carry in my bookbag. If I won't use an item multiple times during the week, it's not worth the extra weight in my bag. If I lost them today, I'd buy them again.

Kids in my classroom love to make silly sentences when on small group.

This product crapped out on me after about 8 months. Granted it was put to hard use, but it just didn’t hold up. Won’t charge anymore. My guess is because it got water damage.

There are no directions to how to use these included in the package. There is a website listed for more information but I also couldn't find any guide on these there. It says color coded by parts of speech but I don't see a key. I bought these as one of the things I hoped to use with my child to teach him grammar more adequately than I was taught, I was in AP English and we "learned grammar" with some computer program diagramming sentences for about 2 weeks, but mostly anything I know, I learned in foreign language classes or intuitively absorbed "because it sounds/looks right." I didn't see any resources on Teachers Pay Teachers either for how to use these. I am sure I'll figure a way to use these eventually once I start a grammar curriculum with my child but I am rather disappointed out of the box.