Social Studies Diagrams

Any Social Studies teacher understands that diagrams can help students understand things like population movement, battle strategies, or even the sequence of events.

Mamacita over at Scheiss Weekly has done something administrators love. She has connected two academic areas for an interesting twist on learning the parts of speech. She has taken important historic words and diagrammed them.

The example I show here, of course, is the Pledge of Allegiance. Mamacita also shows us the Preamble to the Constitution over at her site here. Look for the post from September 17, 2006. When I begin to teach students to diagram sentences I always like to end my first lesson with a very long and involved sentence to show kids what they might eventually be able to do with their diagrams. They were fairly impressed with the long sentence I diagrammed this year, but I guarantee you they will be very motivated when I show them the diagram of the pledge. Connections work when you can link something new to something students are very familiar with.

I think this is just “way too cool”. I have been using diagrams with my fourth grade Language Arts students because it helps them to break down the words into the “jobs” they fulfill in the sentence. If your district is “into” graphic organizers then sentence diagramming meets the definition of an organizer.

One of the standards Georgia fourth graders are required to master is “Students will identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in a sentence.” We’ve started out simple….subject predicate, adverbs, and adjectives. We have also diagrammed compound subjects. Ninety-eight percent of my fifty students earned a 90 or better on their last grammar test.

Diagramming works!

Thanks Mamacita!