Constructing the House of Language was written for use as either a refresher course or a reference resource for high school students. It covers parts of speech, sentence diagramming (called sentence charting in this book), paragraph structure, spelling rules, commonly misspelled words, and word roots and origins. It should be used with students who have had prior instruction in these areas of language arts since it treats each topic relatively briefly. It includes examples before presenting exercises for the student, but it moves through each topic more quickly than courses teaching these topics for the first time.
The course consists of a student workbook and a teacher’s edition. The teacher’s edition differs from the student workbook in that it adds a one-page explanation for the teacher and has overprinted answers, including images of sentence diagrams.
The content is presented in five units that you can use in any order. However, the second unit depends upon a student's prior knowledge of grammar, some of which is reviewed in the first unit.
The first unit is printed in color since it uses color coding to help differentiate the parts of speech. The rest of the book is black and white. If you would rather not have students learn diagramming, the lessons in that unit are still useful for helping students learn how words function within sentences.
Students should be able to work independently, but teachers should probably assign individual units as needed for each student rather than just having them work straight through the workbook.
Note that Constructing the House of Language is recommended by the publisher for use in conjunction with their language arts series, Implications of Literature.
