Sentence Diagramming

A couple of streams of thought have come to sort of a confluence recently.  As Josh and I get deeper into learning Latin, I'm finding my shaky grammar skills a hindrance to understanding.  We've been working with participles and how they are declined.  When we first started I could barely remember what a participle was.  Also, the teacher keeps foreshadowing the time when we'll be  learning the subjunctive voice.  I had to go look that one up, because I couldn't remember it at all!  So this had me thinking that it would be good to pull out my copy of Rex Barks and brush up a bit on grammar.  I've found that sentence diagramming is most helpful to me when it comes to trying to make grammar stick.  I think I must be a visual person, even though I've never really thought of myself as such.  But just this past week I was helping Sean with his math and he was learning about factoring.  I remembered and immediately could do the 'factoring tree' method of finding a number's factors.  I could not for the life of me do the other division oriented method.  When we told this to the tutor, she said, well the factoring tree is very visual.  Aha!  So diagramming sentences and factoring trees really work for me.

Sean went to shadow a student at a small, private, Christian classical school the other week.  His father and I think he might need to go to school (at least for a year) to perhaps get him out of his slump and into a well ordered day that requires him to get up and work hard.  Anyway, I've been in a bit of contact with his potential teachers so they can give me advice on how to prepare him for next year.  I have to call the English teacher on Monday.  Sean mentioned something about grammar class and I thought, wow, maybe we should work a bit on grammar as a separate subject.  We've been learning it through Latin, but in the past about every two or three years, I've done a focus on sentence diagramming for a month or two.  Sean needs a round of that I think.  So once again I wondered where my Rex Barks book is.

Then this morning I stumbled across this very helpful site.  Looks wonderful!  I still want my Rex Barks book, but I think this site will be of great help.

Classic English Language Arts

My 15 year old son, another teen and myself all meet about once a week to study history, literature and writing together.  One resource we are currently using is Robert Einarsson's Traditional English Sentence Style workbook.  We are enjoying and appreciating this resource very much.  It explains everything very clearly, concisely, systematically and yet deeply.  And Prof. Einarsson provides it for free!  I think that is awfully generous of him.  Thank you, Professor Einarsson!

Nitty Gritty Grammar

Have a child come down with the Swine Flu.  Have him laid flat out on the couch, sick as a dog, for almost two solid weeks.  Have him grow bored with everything.  Bored with TV, bored with videogames, bored with life.  Bored, bored, bored!  In the meantime, decide impulsively to reorganize your books.  Begin like gangbusters and take great piles of books and stack them around the family room thinking you'll be able to sit and organize them better there.  Lose steam almost immediately.  Have books sit in stacks on the floor for days, causing everyone to have to step over them as they go in and out of the room.  Feel defeated.  Kick yourself for not having your act together.  Vow to yourself every night that you will make yourself do something about those books.  At the top of one of the stacks have there be a book you bought on impulse some years ago but never really read or used.  Have bored to death son spy it and start to read it.  While you cook things for him to try to get him to regain his appetite, have him talk to you enthusiastically about the book.  Have him laugh at the funny parts.  Have him discuss aspects of grammar that you never thought a 10 year old would find fascinating.  Thank God for the silver lining that came with the dark cloud of sick kids and chaotic housekeeping.