Third Grade is the beginning of the next stage of intellectual formation. In the classical curriculum this stage is called the Grammatical Stage. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning, calls it the "Poll-Parrot" stage, in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable. "At this age, 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."

For the student observation and memorization are the focus of these scholastic years. This approach both trains the student's mind and helps him to gather material for use in the next part of the Trivium, the Dialectic Stage.