mr. dyba's plain olde web page
Hey, Mr. Dyba here comin' at you from inside of this this little electrical gizmo in front of you. I am currently out of the office, but if you leave a message at the beep . . what a second . . . I think that's that other contraption. So hard to keep up with all this newfangled tech-knowlege-e. Any old hoo, here are a few facts about that voodoo that we do in room 503.
Grammar - Call it a lost art (language art?), but I still insist on beating the dead horse that we call grammar. Weekly we do Wordskills units, which are basically vocabulary in action. We get our 15-20 words from our workbook and play with them by using them in stories, sentences, poems, etc. as well as finding synonyms and antonyms for each word. Also, we delve into the Heath Grammar and Composition books (lovingly referred to as "the Blue Book", because, well, it's blue) to explore how words relate to each other in a sentence. We do this on an almost weekly basis. Lastly, in Skillbuilder (a daily refresher class that meets daily from 11-11;30), I attempt to resurrect that dinosaur called 'diagramming' which is basically a way of graphing a sentence.
Reading - We do reading in various forms on an almost daily basis in the guise of short stories, poems, picture books, songs. articles and novels. From each work of fiction we look specifically at the elements of a story, beginning firstly with a simple format (picture books) and then progressing to short stories and finally novels. I find that most students this age are eager to read, as long as the material is something that captures their fancy or deals with their world.
Writing - Writing in my classroom is done mainly in essay or open-ended format. We first go through an exhaustive outlining process followed by a detailed walk through each step of that process. Our essay work is done in the areas of persuasion, description, creative narration, and exposition.