I Laid an Egg on Aunt Ruth’s Head: Conquering English and Its Ruthless Ways is the best language arts program you’ve never heard of. Featuring rollicking tales of the narrator and his wacky Great-Aunt Ruth, author Joel Schnoor manages to make the nit-picky details of the English language both engaging and memorable.
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.
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