Sentence Diagramming. Why I do it…
Well, to be honest, I first did sentence diagramming with my kiddos because after the Hub and I decided to homeschool, I took the approach that I should give them the most rigorous education possible on the face of the planet.
After all, I thought to myself, we chose to homeschool because our local schools were little more than babysitting services with a curriculum chock-full of progressive ‘one world’ sludge.
So, I continued to reason with myself, we (the Hub and I) really had an opportunity to create extraordinary human beings. I wanted children grounded in faith, honor, and citizenship with all the tools easily at their fingertips to express themselves. That, I thought, must include sentence diagramming since I had never learned the skill and also had to spend much of my young adult, post-college, life learning to write.
Now, years later, I find that I still spend too much time reasoning with myself in my own head, but both kiddos have made remarkable strides in their writing abilities. The time spent diagramming sentences was well spent as the kids, and I along the way, learned how to better choose the words in their writing that fully express the meaning they wish to convey.
Someone, I think Susan Wise Bauer or John Gatto or perhaps both, said that reading works written by authors in a given time period gives us a window into their world precisely through the choice of words the author selects. And beyond this, an author’s choice of words offers a glimpse at their past experiences, frame of mind, and even morals.
Words offer a window to the soul, so why wouldn’t we teach our children to diagram sentences as part of an overall effort to gift them the art of crafting with words?
