Author:Laura Berquist
Date posted: Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Laura Berquist has kindly given us permission to print her lesson plans syllabi for the following subjects and grades. These are 32 week daily plans in each syllabus to incorporate and use the ideas introduced in her above book. She has an incredible gift for finding materials for a truly Catholic curriculum. At present, we do not carry all the books found in the book lists, but please check our website as we continue to look for them, or check our regular catalogue for substitutions What is very unique about Laura’s methods is that it is adaptable to each child’s needs, and can be easily adapted for multi-child families. Each child can go at his/her own pace.
For more information on Laura Berquist’s Syllabi, book or school, please check::
Mother of Divine Grace School
P.O. Box 1440 Ojai, CA 93024
Phone: 805-646-5818
website: www.motherofdivinegrace.org (where you can view syllabi pages!)
Laura has this to say about her curriculum:
Our curriculum is based on children’s natural stages of development, which mirror the classical Trivium. Miss Sayers, in The “Lost Tools of Learning” directs our attention particularly to the arts of the Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. She points out that two, at any rate, of these subjects are not subjects at all. They are methods of dealing with subjects. Grammar is a subject, in the sense that it means learning about a language, but language is a medium in which thought is expressed. In fact, the whole of the Trivium is intended to teach the tools of learning: methods to be practiced upon. One cannot learn grammar without learning a language or learn to argue and orate without arguing and orating about something. But the subjects are of secondary importance until the tools of learning have been refined.
The Primary Stage (usually K-2nd Grade)
These first years are ordered to the acquisition of the skills necessary for further learning. Concentrate on learning to read well, and learning to write, both in terms of letter formation and powers of expression. Spend time acquiring facility in addition and subtraction. If these things are learned well, all the rest of one’s school time will be much more profitable.
Additionally, time should be spent reading to your child during these years. If your kindergartener doesn’t learn to read this year, or even next year, it won’t finally make much difference in his life. But the saint stories, the tales of noble actions performed by noble people, the fairy tales, with their clear divisions between good and bad, will make a life-long difference.
The Grammatical Stage (usually 3rd-6th Grade)
Third Grade is the beginning of the next stage of intellectual formation. In the classical curriculum, this stage is called the Grammatical. Miss Sayers, in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning, calls it the “Poll-Parrot, in which learning by heart is easy and , on the whole, pleasurable…”
At this stage, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.”
Observation and memorization are the focus of these scholastic years. This approach both trains the mind and gathers material for use in the next part of the Trivium, the Dialetic.
The Dialectical Stage (usually 7th-9th Grades)
In The Lost Tools of Learning, Miss Dorothy Sayers says of this stage, “All events are food for such an appetite. An umpire’s decision; the degree to which one may transgress the spirit of a regulation without being trapped by the letter, on such questions as these, children are born causists and their natural propensity only needs to be developed and trained– and especially be brought into intelligible relationship with events in the grown-up world. Since the children are now interested in argument, capitalize on their natural inclinations. Let them think about reasoning, how it is done, and what works. The emphasis in each subject changes from memorization to analysis; learning to understand and produce an intellectual argument. It is the beginning of the study of Logic and Dialectic, not as one will study it in Aristotle’s Prior and posterior Analytics, but preparing for that study. First the student must see clearly what is being said and why. Reasonable arguments for opposing positions can then be worked out and resolutions proposed, based on ethical and dogmatic principles. This will be done both in writing and in conversation.
The Rhetorical Stage (usually 10-12th Grades)
The Rhetorical Stage overlaps with the Dialectic on one end and the movement to subjects as subjects on the other. It seems to be characterized in the student both by the discovery he needs to know more, and a resulting interest in, and capacity for acquiring information. The imagination is active; there is a new enjoyment of the poetical in literature, art, and music. This combination of information and poetical interests gives the student an ability, which our curriculum fosters, to express himself in elegant and persuasive language. Miss Sayers, in her essay, says of student at this stage, “The doors of the storehouse of knowledge should now be thrown open for them to browse as they will. The things once learned by rote will be seen in new contexts; the things once coldly analyzed can now be brought together to form a new synthesis; here and there a sudden insight will bring about that most exciting of all discoveries; the realization that a truism is true...Any child who already shows a disposition to specialize should be given his head; for, when the use of tools has been well and truly learned, it is available for any study whatever.”