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 Too often I have met with everything from disbelief (at how old-fashioned and out-of-date I was!)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