Speeding through the trivium?

[Marie463]

Here's a philosophical thread for the morning....grab your coffee! If this has been discussed before, please feel free to just point me to the right thread!

 

Do accelerated learners progress through the stages of the trivium more quickly?

 

For example, does a child who learns the "grammar" of a subject quickly ready to move into the dialectic stage earlier? Or, does maturity also play a role?

Is this the very meaning of asynchronous development?

[regentrude]

I found that my accelerated learners are also more mature than their same age peers. So, DD has been able to handle content and complexity at a younger age than is typically appropriate.

We have not been homeschooling from the beginning, but she would have sped through the grammar stage very very quickly has she been allowed to progress at her own speed (for instance, the transition from not knowing all letters at the beginning of K to reading fluently big chapter books took all of three months.)

As it turned out, she was ready for rhetoric stage work and we just skipped 8th grade and called this her Freshman year.

 

Her brother, OTOH, is rather mature, but not quite as advanced in that respect as his sister was. He is able to cognitively deal with a lot of "older" material (taking algebra in 6th grade for instance), but maturity is an issue when it comes to accuracy, persistence, time he is able to focus on one subject, standards. So for him, I think we will take things slower.

 

Of course there are gifted kids who are very immature, have a low frustration tolerance and little patience...

[2smartones]

Yes, it's true that some are able to zip through it. I've found that my kids (and most kids, for that matter), progress in spurts while typical students would progress at a more steady rate. When I first tried to do the "grammar" stage the way my WTM homeschool friends were doing it, I realized right away it wouldn't work for us!

[Dmmetler]

I realized early on that my DD didn't fit in the boxes prescribed by the trivium any better than she fit in any other boxes. So, I take it as it comes, and if that means that we're doing one subject on more a grammar level and another on a rhetoric level, so be it!

[brownie]

I always thought something was off with the stages for my kids. When DS10 was 4 and I was pg, I would lie down with him at night and ask if he had any questions (I meant about the pregnancy). He would always ask me to re-explain molecular motion! A chemist had come to his preschool during chemistry week and set him off on a fascination with science.

 

However, I have seen a recent change in ds10. He now seems to know the answers to things I didn't even think he knew and he asks lots of deep questions i can't answer! He asks about topics I haven't brought up...for example after going over Mendel's pea plant expts, he asked about nature vs. nurture in people(he didn't know to call it that). It is at the pt where I really need to separate him from his younger siblings next year bc they never get a chance to answer questions and the discussion ends up over their heads. Last year it was very feasible to keep him with his 2 yrs younger brother for most work. So I do think they follow the stages but certainly have a need to know "why" a lot sooner than most kids. You see glimpses of the logic stage many years earlier than typical.

 

Brownie

[Quad Shot Academy]

Do accelerated learners progress through the stages of the trivium more quickly?

 

For example, does a child who learns the "grammar" of a subject quickly ready to move into the dialectic stage earlier? Or, does maturity also play a role?

Is this the very meaning of asynchronous development?

 

I think so. My oldest was ready to go with the logic stage reading recomendations in second grade. When he was actually logic stage aged, 5th, I got a ton of history spines from the library for him to pick from. He ended up picking a college text and told me that it was because it finally answered all the WHY questions he had. Why, did people do what they did? Why did certain wars start? Of his choosing, he is writing an essay right now talking about ways a certain war could have been prevented from the perspective of a minister in that time period. He is very excited about it, so I am guessing that is the rhetoric stage.

 

I think maturity in the sense of subject matter is the most difficult part. I am very torn on what to do about that, so I was glad he chose a textbook type history spine. I would not call my son mature behavior wise. He is a goof ball and still plays with Legos and nerf guns. Most of his friends are two years younger than him.

 

I think his development is asynchrous only in the skills area because you have to do the work to get there. With reading, writing and reasoning, you can intutitively make huge leaps. With math and grammar, you have to go through the steps.

[acurtis75]

I can only answer this from my perspective as a mom of an accelerated daughter who just turned 6. I have found that she seems to be thinking through the logic of things and asking LOTS of questions that deal with the how and why of things and has been for several years. In the last week at her prompting we've discussed who created God, why Daniel wasn't in the fire with the 3 Hebrew boys since he surely wouldn't have bowed to the king either, why water doesn't have protein or carbohydrates, why Alexander the Great's soldiers were willing to fight to the death, whether or not Judas betraying Jesus was a good thing because we really needed Jesus to die on the cross for ours sins....all day long she comes to be with "you know mommy, I've been thinking" followed by things like counting by 4's is like counting by two's but just twice as fast and other random things I haven't taught her. All of that being said, I think it still takes a certain amount of time to get through the "grammar" of some things like Math & Latin for example. She might be able to read the Latin curriculum and understand it in a week if I let her but I'm not sure she could "learn" or memorize all her vocabulary without spending some time working on it. I struggle with making sure I balance moving fast enough to challenge her with developing the discipline of putting forth the effort required to "study" a subject.