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.
As a lover of language, it’s important to me that my kids understand our language well. I want them not only to be able to decode words and communicate effectively, but also to have the capacity both for deconstructing complex or difficult thoughts and for shaping their own language into something powerful and beautiful. I want them to understand the structure of language so that they can use their knowledge to understand the power behind others’ words and so that they are able to build sentences (and paragraphs, memoirs, letters to the editor, memos, love notes) that carry weight and convey meaning with clarity and perfect emphasis.
One powerful tool a good writer has in her toolbelt is the knowledge that sentences, unlike puzzles, can be assembled in many different ways. In fact, there are almost always numerous correct ways to construct a sentence–as well as a few incorrect ways. Changing sentence structure not only keeps writing from seeming repetitive and boring, it also serves to change the shade of meaning. To emphasize this fact and to get my kids started on the road of thinking about their sentence construction, I’ve devised a descriptive writing exercise. While we’re using Michael Clay Thompson’s language arts materials, the activity below would be useful for any student who has a basic knowledge of the parts of speech and their functions. My kids are young, so for them this will merely be an introduction to the concept of sentence structure, but this is an activity I could easily have done when I taught 8th graders. In fact, I think all ages can benefit from writing exercises like this one.
Here are my step-by-step instructions:
butmostlymommy 