Update - 23rd September 2021: this post is now, to all intents and purposes, null and void, since we've now added full authoring capabilities, allowing you to create complex SentenceBuilders. It's been left here, though, because it contains useful information about the need to give careful consideration to your SB content and ensuring that the sentences that it produces are accurate.
See this NEW blogpost: Creating [complex] interactive SentenceBuilder "machines" that work :)
SentenceBuilders.com is primarily about teachers and students interacting with our SB Premium resources, featuring complex SentenceBuilder tables, and based largely -- but not exclusively -- on the content of the Sentence Builders books from the Language Gym team.
But the site also offers teachers the facility to create their own "column-based" resources. This blog post looks in detail at these column-based resources and makes some recommendations for creating column-based SentenceBuilder resources that work best on SentenceBuilders.com.
Column-based SentenceBuilders
A column-based SentenceBuilder (see image above) can be used to generate 100s or even 1000s of random sentences which can form the basis of word-, chunk- and sentence-level interactive activities, which scaffold listening, reading and writing practice in multiple ways.
Your user-generated column-based SentenceBuilder resources can be used as the basis for assignments and competitions that you can set up for your classes, and they can provide you with all sorts of feedback about student progress and performance.
Your column-based SentenceBuilder resource can also be used front-of-class for all sorts of interactions including speaking practice.
So... how does a column-based resource differ from an SB Premium resource?