One skill that I believe my children should learn is diagramming sentences. When they diagram sentences, I can see how the lightbulbs come on and they understand better. Diagramming helps them not just in their English and Latin lessons, but more generally in comprehending how words are strung together to make sentences meaningful, no matter the language.

My favorite diagramming resource is — my kids prefer doing this together so what we usually do is gather round, and then I read the lesson to them. They then pass the book from person to person, each person reading the examples aloud. They spend 10 minutes or so making up their own sentences and diagramming them afterwards. Quick and relatively painless.

I thought I’d spice things up a bit this year, though, so I went online to look for some additional helps, and I found a couple you might like as well:

Sentence Diagrams by Eugene R. Moutoux — you’ll have to click on each link to see the examples. Might help if you use tab browsing and have everything open in different tabs, rather than backspace after each example.

Wisconsin Technical College has a Flash page where you can try diagramming. There are 33 pages in all. I found it easy to use and easy to understand; my only quibble is that it’s difficult to place the slanted downward lines into their proper spots. The words are much easier to move to the exact locations, but you can’t move forward to the next lessons unless you put the lines in also.