Color-Coded Sentence Diagrams
Grammar rules are a lot more fun to learn when bright colors, map-making, and cooperative games are part of the learning experience!
1. Dive into Ruth Heller’s parts of speech books. Start with Merry-Go-Round: A Book About Nouns and Kites Sail High, which is about verbs.
2. On dry-erase boards, write short, two-word sentences, using only a noun and a verb, with Crayola Dry-Erase Markers. Add a simple word, such as a or the to the beginning of the sentence to make a three-word sentence. Match nouns and verbs to make silly simple sentences, such as The ball bakes or A man skips.
3. After exploring Heller's Mine, All Mine: A Book About Pronouns, substitute pronouns such as he, she, it, or they, for nouns. Add more verbs to make new sentences.
4. A sentence diagram is like a map. To make a simple diagram, draw a horizontal line. Divide it with a vertical line down the middle. Nouns and pronouns are placed left of the vertical line, verbs on the right. Use your dry-erase markers to diagram your sentences. Color code nouns and verbs, perhaps with black and red.
5. Continue to read Ruth Heller books. Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: A Book About Adjectives and Many Luscious Lollipops introduce many fun words used to describe nouns. To add adjectives to a sentence diagram, draw diagonal lines under the noun. Try a green marker to write adjectives.
6. Learn more about verbs by reading Up, Up and Away: A Book About Adverbs. Use a blue marker to add adverbs written on diagonal lines under the verbs on your sentence diagram. Fill your board with sentences and then erase to try new ones.
7. Learn all about prepositions in Behind the Mask. Where would you put a preposition in a sentence diagram? Find out!
8. As your diagramming skills improve, work in small groups to diagram more complicated sentences. Take turns passing a dry-erase board around to group members. Each person places a word in the correct position on the diagram.
Adult supervision is required for any arts & crafts project.
Small Parts—
WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD—Small parts. Not for children under 3 years.
- Enjoy Heller's Fantastic! Wow! and Unreal! A Book About Interjections and Conjunctions. Discover interjections from long ago and surprise friends with exclamations of "Alas!" "Alack!" or "Egad!" Use bright colors and bold, patterned letters to create an interjection poster. Sprinkle these words throughout your stories. Have fun with the words, or, as Ruth Heller would say, "They're capitalized and punctuated, and stand alone when emphatically stated." Cool! Wow! Whoopee! Hallelujah!
- List your favorite nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in your writing folder. When writing, make your stories extraordinary by adding some of these words. Write a better story by turning an ordinary sentence, such as The dog walked down the street into a unique sentence: The enormous, hairy mastiff dashed wildly down the tiny, overcrowded street. That's quite a story in only one sentence!
- Assessment: Provide a series of mixed-up sentences for students to first unscramble, then diagram.
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