How do you know when your child is ready to transition from grammar to dialectic to rhetoric?
There are many guides out there in the classical education world with recommendations based on age or grade level, but it is really up to the parent/teacher to determine when the child is ready.
What are signs of readiness?
When a child is ready to move on from grammar to dialectic/logic, I look for her to begin making connections and asking lots of questions. The age/grade levels are a guide only. My daughter began making connections earlier than the recommendations. I didn’t want to hold her back with a too-low reading level or have her get bored with further memorizing. We moved on in our curriculum to the “dialectic level.” We still often read the grammar books with the younger siblings because they’re awesome. We continued with memorizing new material. We continued with history timelines. Some things don’t change.
The reading lists on Ambleside Online are a great guide. They are challenging. If they’re too easy, then you need to look to move up to keep the child interested. The key is to challenge without frustration. We don’t want to overwhelm; we just want to challenge. They don’t necessarily coincide to grade levels.
It concerns me to read articles citing that some children shouldn’t expect to even move on to the rhetoric level (can’t find the reference, but I remember reading this recently). I feel it’s my duty to get my children to that level where they can eventually surpass the master and self-teach.
Rhetoric is Socratic dialogue and critical thinking about what is learned. (Dictionary definition: “The art of speaking and writing effectively.”) I think this is one area in which our schools are sorely lacking–as is most of society! The idea of “can’t” permeates our mindsets. If no one else (or very few) achieves it, then it must be impossible or improbable. Our curriculum rhetoric level is advanced high school and even college level reading and work
How does your child learn best?
The descriptions of different learning styles really helps me adapt my teaching of different lessons and subjects to each of my children while not expecting fish to climb trees.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einstein
Parents should know their children best and monitor challenges to observe when it’s best to move into the next learning level. I love this about homeschooling. I learn along with my children and I know them intimately: what their interests are, what they love and dislike, where their passions lie. I know what frustrates them. I can reteach a concept that’s difficult or we can all help learn together. We can move on when we’re ready. We can skip pages (gasp!). We can do 2nd grade math and 4th grade reading or mix it up however it works best for us.
The three foundations of a classical education:
Grammar Level {Grammar overview}
Dialectic Level {Dialectic or Logicoverview}
Rhetoric Level {Rhetoric overview}
“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.” ~ Plato
When I began teaching my eldest, I had no idea what I was doing.
All options were wide open to me. I had taught public middle and high school students, and college courses. What was I supposed to do with a bright five-year-old? And that whole October birthday thing just threw us off schedule! That first year was difficult.
I started with The Well-Trained Mind (TWTM). I’m not sure how I discovered it, but it must have just been an internet search. I think it appealed to me that it was an education such as I would have desired to have (and aha – there’s The Well-Educated Mind – for others like me!).
We had no real friends who homeschooled. No mentors. We had just moved from Georgia to Texas, thanks to the Air Force. I couldn’t find a teaching job, and her birthday was too late for her to begin kindergarten, even in a private school. God closed every door to direct us to home educate our children.
I loved the curriculum options for all subjects from 1st-12th that are laid out in The Well-Trained Mind (TWTM). Yay for choices! But I had set in my mind that my daughter should be in kindergarten. She was only just 5 in October! Yet I knew in my heart that she was well beyond what kindergartners did all day. (She would have been a trouble-maker in school, that one.)
So I began with an old math workbook and a set of readers from my husband’s mother. She had taught kindergarten and second grade for 32 years! I let Liz set the pace. We sat at the kitchen table for “school” every morning.
My child completed all the “kindergarten” work I had for her in ONE MONTH. Now what?!
Since she already knew how to read fluently, I bought the first volume of The Story of the World and we went. to. town. We read through that and loved the notebooking and the narrating and the doing of fun projects. I loved the combining of history and literature – it seemed gloriously fun to do these unit studies.
We read through First Language Lessons (when it was levels 1 and 2 in one book!) and that was highly enjoyable for both of us. The English teacher inside me just ate it up! She loved the copywork and handwriting exercises. She is highly developed in language. We’ve never formally studied grammar or spelling after that. She now gets all her grammar education from her Latin programs.
I followed TWTM that first few years religiously. I had no other guidance. It was safe.
For the most part, she did really well and everything was fine with TWTM module.
Then she hit those upper elementary years. Tragedy!
The Story of the World just didn’t cut it for her that second time around. You’re supposed to cycle through those 4 volumes of history 4 times, digging deeper in each cycle, but we dug pretty deep on the first go-round.
Thus began the search for something more in-depth.
We dabbled in Charlotte Mason lessons for a year, but we needed more structure. I was in survival mode with another move across the continent and a new baby!
We now use Tapestry of Grace for our main curriculum. It encompasses history and literature, with all the necessary components, such as geography and writing. It divides the curriculum into four levels of classical education: lower and upper grammar, dialectic (logic), and rhetoric. {Story of the World is a core text during the upper grammar level.} We cannot express how much we love it. Our library is very well utilized and our bookshelves are overflowing. We use notebooking every week for the history and literature assignments. We like some of the craft projects and the fine arts program. It is well worth the price, especially to be able to use it for multiple children throughout the years. Some weeks, we have a family read-aloud, but mostly, the kids have different reading selections all on the same theme. I love how well it suits us!
For my two middle kids, First Language Lessons was just ok. I’m not sure if it’s me or them or a combination of us all, but we didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I did with my eldest. They do love the poems and letter writing activities, but perhaps the grammar memorization was too much for them. Part of this may be that we need to get to reading fluency before studying parts of speech thoroughly. Much of it may just be different personalities and abilities. I didn’t use it at all with my son.
And the point to classical education is for the child to go at the pace at which his or her mind develops. It’s a cognitive progression. I have no need to rush my middle kids and no need to compare them to where my eldest was at their age. Age doesn’t matter with classical education. And I’ve never been a stickler for “what grade they’re in.” I don’t have to fit them into those boxes. Thank God.
While my eldest is extremely interested in every aspect of history, my second child is not. My third child likes only some of it. One balks at copywork, and the others love it. My second is fascinated by math; my eldest is not. #3 and my eldest are both linguistically gifted, reading early and desiring to learn foreign languages. My second struggles a bit with reading since she is so right-brained! I constantly re-evaluate my methods and try not to compare the children to each other. I can tell my son will probably be very verbal and I breathe a sigh of relief for my boy to love books in addition to being a very kinesthetic learner. And all my children are very musical (whereas I am not).
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