Trivium - What do you know?

[mamatoablessing]

I am researching private kindy for my oldest DD and am seriously considering a school that uses the trivium concept. It is a Christian school (which I'm ok with) but I don't know if this is limited to religious schools or not? I'd love to hear anyone's opinions or thoughts on this concept. From their website:

Early Grammar
(Pre-polly)
Grades PreK-3

Student Characteristics
1. Obviously excited about learning
2. Enjoys games, stories, songs, projects
3. Has short attention span
4. Wants to touch, taste, smell, and see to learn
5. Imagines, creates

Teaching Methods
1. Guided discoveries
2. Explorations
3. Use of lots of tactile items to illustrate points

This sounds just like the kind of learning my DD would really take to.

Thanks in advance!

[skreader]

I think this may be a "Classical Education" concept. The idea is that learning is broken up into 3 stages: Grammar, Logic, & Rhetoric.

The 1st level - Grammar, is the most basic. It involves memorizing & learning basic facts:

"The first years of schooling are called the "grammar stage" — not because you spend four years doing English, but because these are the years in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid, just as grammar is the foundation for language. In the elementary school years — what we commonly think of as grades one through four — the mind is ready to absorb information. Children at this age actually find memorization fun. So during this period, education involves not self-expression and self-discovery, but rather the learning of facts. Rules of phonics and spelling, rules of grammar, poems, the vocabulary of foreign languages, the stories of history and literature, descriptions of plants and animals and the human body, the facts of mathematics — the list goes on. This information makes up the "grammar," or the basic building blocks, for the second stage of education. "

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/classed.php

So, at this stage kids memorize poems and stories and learn things that they will later build on in the "logic" stage and then the "Rhetoric" stage.

I don't have a problem w/ it. Kids often like to memorize stuff (nursery rhymes, dinosaur names, types of cloud formations, song lyrics, etc.)

But, that sounds quite different from the quote you posted. Maybe call up the school and get more info.?