Recite As You Write™ In their letters and stories, our forefathers did not “name” their method for teaching English.  They just described what students did and, at the same time, narrated important insights into the teaching process.  We read in letters and stories that such and such a child is “ciphering the 23rd Psalm” and that another child “has finished the speller the fifth time.” Without historical background, today’s citizen will read the words “ciphering” and “finished the speller” and think of them as “writing words” and “learning lists of words for weekly tests.”  The way the student learned his spelling words perhaps will be perceived as “he memorized word lists by writing them or spelling them aloud enough times so he could retain them for weekly tests.” The historical picture is different.  We know the student who is described as “ciphering” was also “reciting,” and the student who had “finished the speller the fifth time” had studied each word as a compilation of sounds which he individually said as he wrote each single-letter or multi-letter symbolic counterpart.  We also know the phonetic study of words was sometimes referred to as “spelling,” sometimes as “reading,” sometimes as “writing,” but at no time in our early history were these skills thought of as separate activities. The name we give to our forefathers’ teaching method is “recite as you write” or “full-spectrum neurological response instruction.”  It also may be called multi-sensory direct instruction as described under the previous heading.