Life Sentences

1 Life Sentences! ©1989 Bob Grubb Life Sentences! is designed to entertain children of all ages. There are no formal rules, no practice drills, no timed tests. Its educational value is tucked away where it can't be avoided… The child in us delights at computers “talking”. This application makes your computer “read” your words. The user tells the computer what to say by clicking on words, pictures of words, or by selecting words from menus. If the user can click the mouse, the computer will talk. This is all the encouragement needed for children to spend time with the program. All this selecting develops eye hand coordination as the user becomes more expressive. Life Sentences! contains most of the words known as “Basic English”. Other words can be typed in but, of course, this is not a typing program! As words are selected they are spoken, then listed one after another. At any time the series of words can be spoken as a sentence. It is not necessary that the words actually form a grammatically correct sentence. The program will re-form the displayed words to give the appearance of a sentence. The program does not teach that sentences begin with a capital letter and end with punctuation, or that words are separated from one another by a single space. However, these are the rules the program uses. The word series “cat dog boy man” becomes “Cat dog boy man.”, capitalizing the first word, removing extra spaces, and adding the period. There is no demand to pay attention to this, it is simply there to be noticed. Those not yet reading, or just beginning to read, are not hindered. When a word is selected it is displayed and read. The youngest users need not form correct sentences to get the computer to talk. Life Sentences™ by Bob Grubb 2/9/24 2 They will begin associating word appearance with word pronunciation. Basic facts are established as the user learns where words can be found. She learns that “I” is on the “Who” menu, “above” is on the “Where” menu, “before” is on the “When” menu, any sort of activity is on one of the “Do” menus, words that describe are on the “Qualities” menus. Words like “but” and “the” are not on a menu, but always on the screen, and used often. They find that for some strange reason, words like “is” and “am” are on the “Be” menu. It is hoped that by the time she learns grammar at school she is already familiar with some terms. Different forms of the words are obtained by holding down the Option and/or Command key. For instance: no key Command Option Both keys QUICK QUICKER QUICKEST QUICKLY SHOW SHOWED SHOWS SHOWING GO GONE GOES GOING TRUCK TRUCKED TRUCKS TRUCKING Users find that the computer reads the sentence with differing inflection, depending on punctuation…