Forms Overview

Classes at Niagara Classical Academy operate on the historic Forms model rather than discrete grade divisions. This model has several advantages.

Student-Teacher Relationships:

Forms foster continuity by allowing students and teachers to forge meaningful bonds over a span of several years. This enables teachers to better perceive each child holistically, discerning their individual attributes, weaknesses, strengths, and passions.

Student-Student Relationships:

Similarly, this prolonged association facilitates the cultivation of camaraderie and companionship among students, unmarred by frequent disruptions. It is also beneficial for students’ educational and character development to see what is expected of students at other ages. Younger students can aspire to the higher levels of mastery that they see in older students, and older students are given a built-in opportunity to practice modeling both virtue and academic growth for their younger classmates.

Socially Natural:

Life beyond high school rarely adheres to rigid divisions based on birth year. The workplace, collegiate environment, church, and even familial settings do not operate within such confines. By immersing students in a broader peer spectrum, the Forms model equips them with invaluable skills for navigating real-world scenarios in a more true-to-life manner.

Because of the classical emphasis on mastery, the forms model also provides scope for more robust and complete academic development – the negative associations with “repeating a grade” are eliminated, and students have more opportunities to master the material on a spectrum of age-appropriate metrics. This will also help to promote growth at an appropriate pace for each unique child, as opposed to artificially advancing students to keep them in their peer group regardless of maturity or ability.

Forms also work well with the classical commitment to small class sizes. Where granular grade designations can lead to lopsided class sizes – i.e. 5 students in Grade 2 and 14 in Grade 3 – a school based on forms can simply add another First Form class, rather than artificially splitting or consolidating students. It is also a model that solves many staffing challenges of smaller schools, as well as allows for student body growth.

Financial Stewardship:

Contemporary grade divisions are financially unwise in a deliberately small school. Instead, we take a lesson from earlier eras and divide our classes into forms spanning 2-3 years. This reduces the number of faculty needed to provide an excellent education, resulting in a significant decrease in per-student costs.

Financial Stewardship:

The foundational principles of the Forms model resonate with historical educational practices across diverse cultures and epochs. From the scholastic traditions of medieval religious institutions to the pedagogical approaches of early American colonial and frontier schools, the efficacy of grouping students into broader cohorts has endured through time.

Primary School: First & Second Forms

Primary school, traditionally ranging from grades 1 through 6 (elementary school), consists of two forms at NCA:

First Form

The first form is a cohort of students normally ranging from ages 5-7.

Students at this age excel at concrete learning, such as memorizing the alphabet, counting and foundational math, and greatly expanding their vocabulary as they learn new words.They aren’t normally ready for more abstract concepts, such as more complex rules of grammar, higher level math (such as pre-algebra), and the dialectical/logical concepts.

Because of this dynamic, first form students focus on reading, writing, and being read to. As they interact with texts and narrate those texts back (both orally and in writing), they will rapidly expand their mastery of language in a very organic way. At this age, it is far more important for children to gain a sense of how words and sentences work, rather than the abstract knowledge of why it is that way. Later, they will abstract from the text, learning how nouns, verbs, subjects, punctuation, and other grammatical rules work and why; but because of the foundational work done in first form, they will be building on what they already know intuitively and organically.

This dynamic takes place across many subjects. Students will be learning history, theology, literature, and more by way of interaction with the text in reading and being read to.

At the same time, students at this age range soak up knowledge like sponges. They are able to memorize astonishing amounts of information. We take advantage of this ability by introducing students in the first form to Latin. Through songs and chants, they will learn basic pronunciation and a significant amount of vocabulary.

At this stage, students do not focus on learning the abstract “why” of the Latin grammar. They won’t be parsing verbs, learning cases, etc. But they will be organically learning a lot of contextualized Latin words.

Second Form

The second form is a cohort of students normally ranging from ages 8-10.

Students at this age begin to grow into the abstract concepts that they were preparing for in first form, and the second form curriculum reflects this maturing ability. Now, as they continue in math, history, grammar, science, languages, etc., they will begin to learn the rules, laws, and orderly systems at work behind the subjects they interact with.

One of the main emphases of this form is to continue to cultivate mastery of words, both written and spoken. Virtually all subjects will include a focus on reading and narration. Students will increasingly cultivate the ability to organize and communicate the ideas and truths they are engaging with throughout the curriculum.

Third Form

The third form is a cohort of students normally ranging from ages 11-13.

In this age range, even as students build on the foundation achieved in the primary school years, they are able to understand more complex subjects, truly master abstract concepts, and begin to organize and communicate ideas into a holistic worldview. To this end, students in the third form begin to study the mechanics and grammar of language—including those foreign languages they have been building fluency and vocabulary in since year one. They begin to study logic and dialectic in earnest, working to understand arguments, to deconstruct truth claims and test them against the Scriptures.