The Lyman Program teaches the skills of reading, writing, and spelling implicitly, through the child's habit learning system, which, logically enough is the same system that children use to learn to speak and understand what they hear. You will find no explicit direct instruction being used in the Lyman Program. The child's focus is on movement, body control, rhythm, gesturing, concentration, and memory. Each one of the activities that the child will be involved in is designed, in synergy with all of the listed above and more, to establish the skills of reading, spelling, and writing. The child is aware that they are learning these skills, but feel no pressure or urgency in learning them because, by learning through the brain's habit network, attention is on the activities generating the skills, not on the goal of the activities. 

 

The Lyman Program integrates all kinesthetic activities with symbolic language. Visual representation of symbols is expressed via movement. Major emphasis is placed on conceptual ability (the ability to deal with parts and whole simultaneously) at auditory, visual, motor and cognitive levels. Basically, new cognitive processing is taught by a physical action procedure. Initially, body inclusion is essential to the program but gradually the body is excluded and cognitive processing is internalized. 

 

The Lyman Program will help with the following:

 

• Increase visual, auditory and motor attention and concentration

• Decreases distractibility while increasing impulse control

• Teaches visual, auditory and motor sequencing

• Increases fine and gross motor skills

• Enhances visual, auditory, motor, short and long term memory

• Teaches phoneme segmentation and manipulation

• Enhances academic skill and content transfer 

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If you're not reaching a child you're not teaching a child

                                          Donald E. Lyman Ph.D

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