Sentence Diagramming Summer Camp! - Learn All 8 Parts of Speech in 1 Week

This course is a condensed version of my Beginner Sentence Diagramming course. Students will be introduced to all 8 parts of speech and will learn how to diagram all of the parts of speech. Students will learn about different sentence types, and they will practice using their new knowledge of parts of speech, sentence types, and proper grammatical structure to improve their writing. This is an intensive course which will meet 5 times in one week for 50 minutes each session. I like to create a fun, friendly, comfortable environment where students get to share ideas and answers. 

I must admit, I don't think I truly remembered what the parts of speech were or how to identify them until I took a Linguistics class as a freshman in college where I learned how to diagram sentences. When I learned diagramming, something finally clicked, and I understood many patterns and rules of the English language that I had never fully comprehended before. Fortunately, you don't have to be a college freshman before you learn sentence diagramming. Diagramming starts out very basic with two word sentences, and you build on the sentences and add new parts of speech from there. I use the Reed-Kellogg version of sentence diagramming. 

When I tried to teach 8th grade language standards to the students I worked with in public school, they had no idea how to explain or identify gerunds or how to use verb moods because they didn't know what a noun and a verb were! We started at the beginning with sentence diagramming, and within a few weeks my students could identify nouns, verbs, articles, adjective, adverbs, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, and compound sentences. It was amazing to see the progress they made through diagramming sentences for 5-10 minutes at the start of each class. Sentence diagramming is a more thorough way to learn the parts of speech because students MUST identify the function of each word in the sentence. This is not like a grammar workbook, where students learn the definition of a noun, and then must pick out all of the nouns in a sentence. Workbooks tend to teach the parts of speech in isolation. Sentence diagramming shows students how the parts of speech work together in a sentence to create patterns and meaning.

At the start of each class in this course, we will overview what we are going to learn in the lesson for the day. Students will be introduced to a new part of speech or aspect of diagramming. I will spend a few minutes lecturing and showing students examples on Google Slides. Then, students will practice diagramming sample sentences on their own. We will share answers, and students will have time to make their own sample sentences to diagram. Each class will consist of some lecture time and some time for students to share answers with one another. 

Students do not need any prior experience to join this class. Even if students understand what a noun and a verb are, they will still benefit from the slow but steady progression of adding other parts of speech and learning about important grammar rules. 

I am actually very excited about sentence diagramming. I know how much it helped me, and I have seen it work with many students.  Though it may be a dry topic to some, I think your learner will feel my enthusiasm throughout our classes. I cannot wait to see them learn and grow!

The progression of this course is very important. Student must learn what a coordinating conjunction is before they can understand a compound subject. The same is true for many other pieces of sentence diagramming. I take the progression of all sentence diagramming courses seriously, and I have found that the order in which I introduce new parts of speech works well for my students. 

Meeting 1: The essential components of a complete sentence. Subjects and verbs + the base of a sentence diagram. Diagramming two word sentences. Defining and identifying helping verbs. Adding helping verbs to sentence diagrams.

Meeting 2: Defining and identifying articles and adjectives. Adding articles and adjectives to sentence diagrams. Defining and identifying adverbs. Adding adverbs to sentence diagrams. Defining and identifying prepositions and prepositional phrases. Defining and identifying adjectival and adverbial prepositional phrases. Adding adjectival and adverbial prepositional phrases to sentence diagrams. 

Meeting 3: Defining and identifying coordinating conjunctions. Diagramming compound sentences. Defining and identifying compound subjects. Adding compound subjects to sentence diagrams. Defining and identifying compound predicates. Adding compound predicates to sentence diagrams. Defining and identifying compound adjectives and adverbs. Adding compound adjectives and adverbs to sentence diagrams. Defining and identifying compound prepositional phrases. Adding compound prepositional phrases to sentence diagrams. 

Meeting 4: Defining and identifying linking verbs, predicate adjectives, and predicate nominatives. Diagramming linking verbs, predicate adjectives, and predicate nominatives. Defining and identifying direct and indirect objects. Adding direct and indirect objects to diagrams. Review of all that we have learned. 

Meeting 5: Identifying transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs. Practice diagramming different types of verbs. Defining and identifying interjections and nouns of direct address. Diagramming interjections and nouns of direct address.