Amen to your use of diagramming to teach sentence meaning and
interaction of components.  I have been trying to do this for the
past 20 years.  Too often I have met with everything from disbelief
(at how old-fashioned and out-of-date I was!) to open hostility--not
from my students, but from fellow English teachers and workshop
facilitators!!  So what I have done is to bring it in through the
back door as a visual aid to help students get a visual concept of
the structure of sentence meaning.  Essentially, I went underground!
Unfortunately, as the amount of areas to be "covered" in language
arts increased, this tool and skill have had to take somewhat of a
backseat.  We began block scheduling with 90 minute blocks this year
and I was able to spend some time (not enough) with structural
explanations.  I plan to expand next year, reverting to actually
REQUIRING student demonstration of diagramming ability.  I am quite
hopeful that this approach will work.
 
There is some tip of the hat to diagramming in the D.C. Heath
ENGLISH  series for high school which is what we use.  I plan simply
to pull example sentences from other classroom resourses and develop
my own units around structural segments.  If you get any good
suggestions of books that are geared to this use, please email me.
No use reinventing the wheel!
 
Thanks for an upper today.  It's good to know there are more of us
out there!  Mary
Mary Weddle                              Taylor High School
English/Oral Communicatons               506 East Pine Street
[log in to unmask]            Taylor, AR 71861
School 501-694-2251                      Library/Fax 501-694-2901
 
Where there is no vision, the people perish.--Proverbs 29:18