Verbs & Adverbs

Crash

Rosetta McLeod

CRASH COURSE By Rosetta McLeod PROGRAMMED BY TEACHERS It is interesting to see that my favourite programs this month were designed, written and produced by practising teachers. Andy Watson in Aberdeen and Bill Elliot in Plymouth, have both become aware that much of the educational software on the market is not really what teachers in schools are looking for, and so have come up with their own products. If you expect these to be amateurish, you'd be wrong - Expose and Nightmare/Potholer are both extremely professional packages which have been thoroughly tested in the classroom. THE GRAMMAR TREE - VERBS AND ADVERBS Producer: Sulis Retail Price: £10.95 Age Range: £13 Verbs and Adverbs is the second of a trilogy of Grammar Tree programs, the others being Nouns and Adjectives and Sentences. All three are intended as a popular learning kit for "anyone who wants to organise all those half forgotten bits of information about basic grammar into a straight forward, cohesive system of grammar". Although the accompanying booklet gives information about 'correctness', the screen text misspells the word 'beginning', and the booklet includes a sentence which is grammatically incorrect! When the program has loaded, the following profound sentences appear on the screen: "In the beginning was the sentence (the Bible calls it the Word). The sentence is divided into the subject and the predicate." An extremely irritating bleep forces you to rush through all the information given, which of course means that none of it is absorbed. The sentences used for examples, such as "Patsy sings sheepish songs", are trite and silly. The menu on the first cassette offers a range of options from Verb and Noun phrases to Auxiliaries and Suppressed Verbs. The second cassette contains exercises to test understanding of the theory. Sentences appear on the screen, and the task is to select the correct group of words to fill the blank. One of the sentences to test knowledge of noun phrases is "...............was standing by the lamppost", and the choice is from People today, you and me, you and he. Certainly Higgins. or Higgins. The scoring system is rather odd as, after answering four questions. I was informed that I had scored 12 out of 12 - one of the questions was repeated three times! I'm afraid that this program is no better than the worst sort of grammar text book, and at least the latter doesn't make silly noises. COMMENTS Control keys: one key commands Keyboard play: good Graphics: none, apart from a simple diagram Use of colour: limited

"Could put you off grammar for life..." Henry looks as if he may well have a flea circus!