Welcome to the English
for Life®—The Madsen Method® Home
Page. We’re
glad to introduce you to our complete English language
arts curriculum. In our literature, we call our
program a “K-8” curriculum. This means
you will teach in 8 years more than what
other language arts curricula teach in grades
K-12!
Our program will guide you and
your student(s) to become proficient in all English
language arts content and skills at a pre-1915
proficiency level. Each student—beginning or
older*— is taught all of English’s explicit language
arts content and skills in an “always makes sense”
integrated way: phonemic awareness through
multi-sensory direct instruction study of English
phonograms, penmanship, spelling, grammar, all forms of
written composition, and reading How The Madsen Method Came to
Be.
*We define an older
student as someone who is ten years old or older
and is being taught something for the first
time. Many students have “holes” in their
language arts armors. When an older student is
being taught missed content and skills for the first
time, he is in these situations a “beginning
student.”
How to Teach Older Students Who Have Not
Yet Become Proficient
English for Life®—The
Madsen Method® is a program for all
students—those entering language arts
instruction for the first time (regardless of age) as
well as those who have been in language arts instruction
but still have disruptive language arts
deficiencies. Certainly, home schooling teachers
want to start a new student out by teaching him from a
curriculum that guarantees he will learn proficiency and
will never have to deal with learning
deficiencies. But when a faulty curriculum
produces a disfunctioning student—one who can’t
spell or read or write, or whose penmanship is atrocious
(also those who have been labeled “special education”),
with confidence home schooling teachers may use our
curriculum to remediate these problems (our program
is one of a kind: it offers you a performance-based
money back guarantee Guarantee to support these
claims).
Christian home
schooling asks this question:
“Can we succeed with teaching English language arts; and
can we do it, not just better than public education, but
as well as our forefathers did?” They
identify this answer: “If we do, we must
rest our efforts solely on two things: we must use
explicit multi-sensory direct instruction as the method
of teaching; and we must base our English language arts
home school program on systematic and intensive phonics,
which is the same as phonemic awareness or
phonetics.”
Most modern language arts
programs seek relief from their theory-produced
failures by redefining literacy as “being able to
read” and designating speaking, penmanship, spelling,
and written composition as “lesser skills.” Modern
programs seek to teach reading through reading, as if
this skill is learned the same way as riding a
bicycle. This way of teaching is called the Immersion Theory. One may learn
to ride a bike without explicit direct instruction, but
one will not learn to speak, spell, write, and read [in
the literate sense] without it. Those who learn to
read by untaught visual memory talent do not possess the
phonemic awareness necessary for literate phonetic
spelling [and resultant literate speaking, spelling,
written composition, and reading] which gives them
speaking-spelling-writing-reading access to all English
words, not just words they can commit to rote
memory.
To encourage
you, we ask you to read this verifiable
statement aloud before you continue: “A
teacher is only as good as her
curriculum!”
A Christian home school
program [in fact, every public, private and
home school program] must begin with instruction in
phonetic spelling coupled with instruction in penmanship
by guiding students to experience through a
multi-sensory direct instruction approach the phonogram
base of English language arts, which is what a reliable,
as well as corrective, phonetics-based, speaking,
penmanship, spelling, grammar, composition and reading
program must teach.
“Phonics” is merely a study of
alphabet letters, information about sounds and alphabet
letter teams, and arrangements of alphabet letters in
words. It relies on a student’s memory of
“how each alphabet letter team or word looks”— alphabet
letter configurations—and does not address the nearly 85
explicit sound-to-symbol relationships that make up all
English words. However, “explicit phonics,” “intensive phonics,”
“intensive explicit phonics,” “systematic and intensive
phonics” and “phonemic awareness”—not “phonics”—are
acceptable terms a program may use to describe the
historically reliable phonogram approach to teaching
speaking, penmanship, spelling, written composition, and
reading.
The home school educator
also must be aware of the method of instruction a
program uses to guide the teacher to teach and
the student to learn English phonograms. Some
programs use “good phonetic terms and content” but do
not use “good teaching methodology.” If the
program says it uses “multi-sensory direct instruction,”
it may mean that sometime during the learning experience
the student is asked to “speak and hear,” at another
time he is asked to “act out” or “role play,” and at
another time he is asked to “write and see.” Thus
they claim the student is asked to use all four of his
language-learning sensory avenues at some time or other
in the instructional process. But this is not true
multi-sensory direct
instruction.
The true test of
multi-sensory direct instruction is whether or
not all four language-learning avenues are used
at the same time: saying, hearing, writing, and
seeing. The teacher, guided by the curriculum,
guides the student to connect his four language-learning
avenues. This is the tried and true multi-sensory
direct instruction teaching method home school spelling
and reading programs should use, the one that duplicates
how our forefathers taught.
English for Life®—The
Madsen Method® uses this method of
instruction. We call it full-spectrum neurological response
instruction, or the “recite as you write” teaching method,
the one our forefathers used to teach English language
arts when all students learned and special education was
not in their experience, therefore not in their
thinking, talking or writing.
It is a true saying that
special education programs—from retarded
through gifted—are the result of fragmented neurological response
instruction. No child can hope to
learn optimally unless the
teacher’s spelling and reading program guides the
teacher to guide the student to use true multi-sensory
direct instruction as the means by which he will learn
the phonemic base of English as well as consequent
applications of phonemic knowledge, like
spelling, grammar, all forms of written composition, and
reading.
The guidance home
educators and public educators need for teaching
phonetic spelling is missing in today’s
theoretical-based, previously tried and rejected
worksheet, workbook, phonics-based spelling and reading
programs which were thrust upon U.S. children in 1930-31
through the efforts of William S. Gray, Arthur Gates and
John Dewey, a program which was soundly rejected by the
Boston School Masters in 1844 after they tried for six
years the controlled vocabulary, sight word memorization
program written by Horace Mann and his wife [which
was based on a program written by Thomas A. Gallaudet
for deaf children]. Today’s language
arts curricula, with only a few notable exceptions, are
designed to teach our children as if they are MUTE and
DEAF!
Look and Say, another name for the
sight word memorization method, which is the same as the
Immersion Theory, has been used in public education for
five generations and is the same program design largely
used in current private and home school programs.
Private and home school programs, using this
theoretical and faulty spelling and reading program
design, cannot Christianize it and expect different
results than are being experienced in public
education! The truth is, Christian home schooling
programs, just like public education programs, are
producing students who are not spellers, writers or
readers in the literate sense [Two Choices: Clerical Teaching or
Disciplined Teaching].
Another non-braggable fact is
this:
“Whatever claims private
and home school educators are making to excellence are
not the results of their language arts
curricula. They could be and should be
setting their own standards of excellence for teaching
English language arts as well as evaluating student
proficiency, not comparing themselves to failed public
education in both areas.”
Recently the U.S.
Department of Education reported that a full 66 percent
of our nation’s fourth-graders read below grade
level. Kavan Peterson
[kpeterson@stateline.org], Staff Writer for
Stateline.org. states: “In the latest snapshot of
how well American schoolchildren are learning, national
test results showed … in the past two years …
nearly zero improvement in reading scores since
1992. About 70 percent of students
nationwide still are scoring below grade level on …
reading tests, according to the latest scores on
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests
released Oct. 19, [2005]. No state had a higher
average eighth-grade reading score in 2005 than in 2003,
and seven states -- Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana,
Mississippi, North Carolina, Utah and West Virginia --
had significantly lower scores.”
NAEP tests are separate from the
state assessment tests required by President Bush's No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which requires all
students in grades 3 to 8 be tested annually in reading
and math and penalizes states that fail to improve
student scores.
"To me, this goes beyond
disappointing," said former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise,
president of the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance For
Excellent Education, an advocacy group that promotes
high school reforms. "It shows that we are
failing to gain ground on the very conditions we need to
reverse to improve our graduation rates and
produce more students who are ready for college and the
workforce."
Chester E. Finn
Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group and
Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education
Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that tracks
the implementation of NCLB, agree that the latest NAEP
scores are consistent with other national standardized
tests such as the SAT, ACT and PSAT, which all have
shown flat achievement rates in reading. “Despite
what the (Bush) administration was claiming, this is an
indication that No Child Left Behind may not have made
much of a difference because these are the same results
we saw before the law was in effect," Jennings
said.
A. Sharon Madsen
of Line & Precept Education Foundation®
says: “Other falsenesses flourishing in our
government’s penchant for testing are: 1) A
‘planned omission’ to use test results for curriculum
and teacher-training improvement and 2) A dedicated use
of test results by the National Education Association
and its favorite politicians to write legislation to
increase funding for the supposed reason of ‘educational
improvement’, when the true purpose is that of keeping
schools afloat, teachers employed, and university
teacher-training programs intact, therefore buying its
way in the political and economic marketplace. The
government, public education, and the NEA should never
be believed when they use the phrase ‘for the good of
the student’.”
Two research-based
statements Christian home education programs should give
complete attention to are:
1) “Good spellers
are always good readers who also can give correct
written responses.”
2) “When the
‘recite as you write’ method of instruction is used to
teach phonograms, spelling, written composition, and
grammar, all children become independently proficient in
all English language arts.”
31 Research-Based
Conclusions
English for Life®—The
Madsen Method® is based on objective,
observable, verifiable, historical data supporting these
statements and produces these results.
The above research-based
statements pinpoint two central problems
home, private and public education have in their efforts
to deal students a “proficiency hand” when it comes to
teaching them to speak, write, spell, compose with, and
read English:
1) Students are not
taught the phonemic base of English as a means of
accessing all English words for the goal of speaking,
spelling, writing and reading them in the literate
sense, which is a failure resulting from asking
students to memorize words while being kept ignorant of
the knowledge base of words.
2) Students
are asked to learn with half their brains tied behind
their backs which is a failure resulting from
asking students to see and write [copy, fill in blanks,
connect symbolic representations of words with pictorial
representations, trace, guess] and not to use the
“recite as you write” multi-sensory direct instruction
method of teaching our forefathers used which requires
students to exercise and connect all four
language-learning avenues in the language-learning
process Learning Is Neurological.
English for Life®—The
Madsen Method® makes these claims:
1) Our program replicates
the ‘recite as you write’, pure multi-sensory direct
instruction method of teaching our forefathers
used.
2) When taught by our program, students
will be educated in the complete knowledge base of
English language arts in a shorter amount of
time.
3) Students who are victims of “rote
memory language arts programs” will be educated in the
complete knowledge base of English language arts as they
are taught by our program.
4) When teaching from
our program, teachers who are victims of “rote memory
language arts programs” will educate themselves along
with their students.
5) Our program is fully
scripted for teachers and students Dear Home Educator
Letter.
6) Our program is a field-tested
[since 1988 and ongoing] authentic replication of how
our forefathers taught.
7) Our program measures
spelling, therefore writing and reading, using a test
nationally standardized in 1915, the earliest
standardized instrument we can find.
8) We offer
on-demand, live help to teachers using our
program.
9) We offer a written performance-based
money-back guarantee supporting these claims.
You have made observations
and have drawn common sense conclusions about how well
your student is learning, why he still has problems, and
the loud and confusing “clamor” going on in home
education. Our easy-to-use reference list will
further educate and arm you with facts about 1) the myth
that intelligence is something fixed at birth, 2) the
fraudulent history of intelligence tests, 3) the truth
about special education and its deliberately selected
list of 37 terms that supposedly describe students
teachers think are odd, with 99 symptoms listed to
characterize only one term—minimal brain dysfunction (no
one tested for special education is expected to escape)
The Truth About Intelligence Testing,
[Most Influential Data Used for Special
Education Placement], 4) how proficiency tests
(standardized achievement tests) fall short [Illiteracy in the USA], 5) the one and
only good use for worksheets and workbooks, 6) the folly
of contrived educational standards, 7) the deliberate
dumbing down of America, 8) the mismeasure of man, 9)
the trouble with testing young children, 10) how well
typical children learn when taught as if they are mute
and deaf,11) how our forefathers taught so well, 12) why
“teaching is the test” [Authentic Curriculum vs. Invented
Curriculum], and other burning topics. See our
Bibliography.
Read all the links
on this Home Page. They will further
equip you as you learn and spread “encouraging
truth.”
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