Ideal from students in grades 3 and up, each lesson in Sentence Diagramming: Beginning is broken down into short, easy to teach and learn lessons. And, for older students, it is easy to use as individual study.
Each lessons is about 4 pages beginning with the teaching part. For instance, in Lesson 6 the student is learning about Predicate Nouns. So page 1 has a brief lesson on Predicate Nouns followed by an exercise. The 1st exercise is always where a sentence is given wrong and the student has diagram the sentence correctly.
The next exercise gives the student several sentences and he must diagram them correctly. The next exercise has the student write 3 sentences himself and then diagram them. The empty diagram is provided so the student must write a sentence that FITS the diagram. The last exercise in the lesson provides a sentence and the student much diagram the sentence in the space provided.
The lessons begin with Lessons 1: Simple Subject and Main Verb and move through Adverbs, Adjectives, Prepositional Phases, Compound Subjects, Predicates and Direct Objects and finish with Lesson 12: Compound Predicate Adjectives and Nouns. There is a Review at the end of the book, which is simply 25 sentences of various types of diagram to review everything covered in the book. Answers to all exercises are provided in the back of the book.
The end of the book has a preview of the Editor-in-Chief book that The Critical Thinking Co.™ states is the next step in the language process in their program. There is an advertisement about the book as well as a sample page.
The book begins with an “About the Book” section that explains why the author wrote the book. Going along with the premise behindThe Critical Thinking Co.™ is logic and Sentence Diagramming: Beginning was written because she wanted a book that presented diagramming as a “logical process.” She explains the benefits of learning to diagram sentences and how she decided to structure her book the way that she did. I found this interesting. I especially that the author stated that the lessons don’t end with Lesson 12. She urges parents and teachers to continue the lessons beyond the book by embracing the “visual organization” of the language and then picking sentences from other places and diagramming them. She also gives hits on how to make it fun by diagramming sentences on butcher paper, poster boards and more.
Overall, I think this book is a very well written, easy-to-understand and use book that teachers the basics of sentence diagramming. It is laid out well and easy to work through. I do prefer to parse sentences before diagramming, and that is what we do in our homeschool, so we actually did this in the lessons, which was easy to add and there was plenty of white space to parse and label sentences before diagramming.
We really enjoyed the book and the extra practice. We are almost totally through with the book and look forward to completing it. It was wonderful practice on diagramming and basic grammar.
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