Characteristics of the Grammar Stage

“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- grades 1-4- the mind is ready to absorb information. Since children at this age actually find memorization fun, 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” for the second stage of education.

“A classical education requires a student to collect, memorize, and categorize information. Although this process continues through all twelve grades, the first four grades are the most intensive for fact collecting.

“This isn’t a fashionable approach to early education. Much classroom time and energy has been spent in an effort to give children every possible opportunity to express what’s inside them. There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, but when self-expression pushes the accumulation of knowledge offstage, something’s out of balance.

“Young children are described as sponges because they soak up knowledge. But there’s another side to the metaphor. Squeeze a dry sponge, and nothing comes out. First the sponge has to be filled. Language teacher Ruth Beechick writes, “Our society is so obsessed with creativity that people want children to be creative before they have any knowledge of skill to be creative with.” Your job, during the elementary school years, is to supply the knowledge and skills that will allow your child to overflow with creativity as his mind matures.

“The key to the first stage of the trivium is content, content, content. In history, science, literature, and, to a lesser extent, art and music, the child should be accumulating masses of information: stories of people and wars; names of rivers, cities, mountains, and oceans; scientific names, properties of matter, classifications; plots, characters, and descriptions. The young writer should be memorizing the nuts and blots of language- parts of speech, parts of a sentence, vocabulary roots. The young mathematician should be preparing for higher math by mastering the basic math facts.”  

-The Well Trained Mind