Teaching the Trivium

The Trivium.

That’s what we’ve intended to teach our children, just didn’t have a name for it. I’ve always ignored references to “The Well Trained Mind”. The little I heard, I didn’t like it. It seemed to me those who followed it were instilling formal schooling in very young children. Not what we believed in. So then hearing others talk about “Classical Homeschooling”, I learned that was the same thing.

So finally I payed attention when one of the email groups I’m in started another round of talking about “Teaching the Trivium”. I didn’t actually pay attention the first few days, but then backtracked when I saw a reference to it that didn’t make me shudder. I went to Trivium Pursuit and was delighted with what I saw there. Wow! “This is what we are doing”, I thought to myself.

My husband called them to order the book (Teaching The Trivium) and a couple of other little books, and it arrived on Saturday. So I’ve been reading and enjoying it tremendously. I was talking to an out of state friend over the phone yesterday, and she and her husband have children the same ages, and are looking at educating their children the same as we are. They had looked at Classical training and said “No” to it. I hope they’ll look at Trivium Pursuits information. It’s Biblical Classical Training. It’s really, really, really interesting and the approach that’s right.

Look for the document to download “Ten things to do with your children 10 and under”. It’s in the book, and nice to have the option to look at it ahead of time. And to have it on the computer.

Training our children to read, using phonics, and to love to learn, and to be self-learners … these have ALWAYS been our first goals in educating them. We talked about it before we were married. We had to wait a while before we had our first child, so we are finally getting to the place where our dear eldest will be reading by himself very well within the year. We are ready to begin a bit more intensive “knowledge” training. No teaching, just training, how-to, watch this son, memorize this, recite this, copy this. That’s not hard. Training our children is not that hard. Of course, we must love them dearly, and want to give them the edge they need to learn for a life time, a life time of service to our Dear Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

My husband and I are looking forward to all that WE are going to be learning in the next 20 or more years, with our children learning all around us.