Rex Barks vs. Drawing Sentences: Curriculum Review for Sentence Diagramming Resources

My kids have studied their parts of speech year after year (albeit with different curricula each time), so I wanted to do something different than they’ve been doing. I had loved doing sentence diagrams as a kid, and I thought my kids might like it, as well. Goobie loves puzzles and organizing, and I’ve read that diagramming appeals to mathy types as well, which Peatie certainly is. Besides, I found it helpful to be able to visualize how sentences fit together, which helped me especially when reading very dense college-level texts.

I did quite a bit of searching online and rejected numerous options due to being too simplistic, not offering enough explanation or practice, or being awfully short for the price charged. I narrowed it down to Rex Barks: Diagramming Sentences Made Easy and Drawing Sentences: A Guide to Diagramming. Both books were roughly $30 on Amazon. Since Rex Barks offered a view of some inside pages, I initially decided to try it instead of Drawing Sentences, which had no “see inside” feature.

These are the two sentence diagramming books we tried using this year. Read on for our thoughts on each of them.
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