How's PACE going for everyone in the midst?

I just started week 6 of working thru PACE with my 11 year old son who will be starting grade 6 in the fall. I took the training myself last winter and I am providing PACE to my son without an outside provider. Because of that (and my lack of prior tutoring experience and ability), I worry that my son may not get as much out of PACE as he would with an experienced outside provider. But, to my surprise, he has been very engaged, perhaps because it isn’t another reading program and he is hoping that this will be his last intensive program. (My son did intensive Lindamood-Bell with marked success several summers ago). Also, the bonus point system has proved to be a great motivator for my son.

Inasmuch as my son has relativley good memory skills and, thanks to LMB, good decoding skills, my main purpose was to improve his processing speed, and his abilty to concentrate and follow directions in the face of distractions and time pressures. So far I can’t identify significant changes, but I remain hopeful that if we continue through the summer we will see such changes once school begins. (My son think that he may have had some skills improvement in some athletic areas so far because of PACE, but he isn’t sure of that.) In the early weeks of PACE, when my son flew through a lot of the levels, he was very motivated. Now that we are working at higher levels for most of the activities, and finding those that are harder for him, I am hoping that we will see identifiable changes, but I also worry that my son’s enthusiasm may wane as he finds it harder to pass new levels and rack up points. He just had a week off for sleep away camp so we’ll have to see how it goes once we get back into the daily routine.

Glad to see that so many parents are posting as they go thru PACE. I’ll try to chime in as we go thru the program this summer. I’ve heard that parents often see significant changes after 6 weeeks so perhaps I’ll have something more to report in another week or two.

We are in the 5th week of PACE. I don’t sit in on the session with my 10 year old son, so I’m not seeing what they are doing. But as far as homework, his main focus has been on the various AIC activities. Being able to sound the words out on a beat can be frustrating at times. He also has difficulty on the left/right exercises.

He just did the golf exercise, which he did very well. There were other activities that he worked on that didn’t take much effort from him.

I’m not familiar with the guidelines of PACE, but I guess that they “assign” the activities toward what the child needs to work on. Is that right? Or does everyone doing PACE work on the same activities during this 12 week program?

I too have not seen any results yet, but I know it is too soon to tell.

I’m glad that there are others who post their progress on this program. I look forward to reading them.

My daughter went through PACE, and then I got certified in it. The activities are different for every child, especially after the first part of the program. Basically, the aim is to run through all the easy stuff quickly at the beginning in order to get to the exercises the child finds difficult. There are about 90 different exercises, so every child is going to end up on different levels of some subset of the exercises by the middle of the program. Usually the goal is to improve areas of deficit so that the skill levels in different cognitive areas are somewhat level.

Mary

Thanks everyone for the encouragement and stories. I’ll keep you posted on our success with PACE.
- rosie

Is it worth while to be a pace provider? When I looked into becoming a provider for my son, it was going to cost me just as much as having someone certified to come to my home. If you calculate the cost to fly to colorodo from Toronto.Can. plus the weeked to stay in a hotel plus the cost of the course,It wasn’t worth it. How did you go about becoming certified? I was hoping that I could do it over the internet like I did for FFW. I was told by the company that they don’t do that.
I’m eager to find out.
Thanx
Barb

I flew to Colorado Springs for the training. The company gives a discount to parents who are training to provide for a child, and an additional $500 discount if the parent puts the child through the program and reports the test results within 6 months.

It is expensive when you add in the flying and hotel. However, the advantage of getting trained yourself is that you have greater flexibility in scheduling sessions, you can put all of your children through the program at no extra cost, and you can do the program more than once.

Where we are, no one would come to the house to do PACE training. It always involves driving the child 3 times a week to the tutoring sessions — and this can get old! However, a big advantage of going through an outside provider is that you let someone else shoulder responsibility for the program. This alone can be major relief.

Mary

Greetings Rosie,

I was trained at the same PACE session as MaryMN.

My dd has a high average IQ and has been diagnosed with APD, VPD, dysnomia (word retrieval disorder), probably ADD inattentive and in May, LD in expressive language and math and she has a poor memory. At the end of 6th grade she was tested as reading at a 3rd grade level. She has completed FFW 1&2, PG (home version), IM, PACE and recently its followup reading program MTC. My now 14yo dd and I began PACE in Sept ‘00. As we progressed through the program, some of her comments included, “I think I’m reading better”, “I’m speaking clearer and not stumbling over my words so much”, “My vision is clearer”, “I can write faster because I can better remember what I’m writing”, “I can listen easier to a softer voice”, “I can work better with distractions”, etc. At around week 4 or 5, she won at Quadruple Solitaire - a fast action, fast processing card game - for the very first time after years of play! We added some MTC to PACE in December and went to MTC fulltime in February just finishing the end of July. On May 17, she was tested at the local ps. At 8th grade, 9th month, she tested 8.6 in Word Identification, 16.9 in Word Attack, 12.2 in Word Comprehension, 9.0 in Passage Comprehension, 10.2 in Basic Skills Cluster, 10.8 in Reading Comprehension Cluster for a Total Reading Cluster of 11.0! We are ecstatic!!! Please note that even though we needed to put in quite a bit more time than the protocol (15+wks PACE and almost 19wks MTC), it was worth it.

Like your son, my dd has great difficult with MAS. Despite hours of work, she is still only working at the beginning level. She cannot consistently repeat back a list of four objects or numbers and that’s without counting in beat as required in the second level! Tanya at PACE told me that memory was the hardest cognitive skill to impact and my dd is proof that’s true! She hasn’t achieved the 5th level (of 10) of DMC; she completed the 5th & 6th levels of MDA but can’t do level 4 (!); nor can she recite all the presidents.

Since I’m trained to provide PACE, we just started working again on the exercises she did not finish - namely the memory ones. Despite this, we think both PACE and MTC are great programs and highly recommend them!

If you have anymore specific questions, please feel free to ask.

Blessings, momo

momo,

As I read your post, I was looking at my son’s PACE workbook (he goes to a certified provider) and can’t find for MDA level 4 or 5 in his workbook. His begins at level 6.1. As well as for DMC, his begins at 6.1, so I don’t see level 5 as you mentioned. Not being a provider or have gone through the training, do you have a different book that what we have?

Another question, how is your daughter reading and performing in school now that you have gone through the various programs? Does she feel like she is performing at grade level, is she comfortable with gradel level school work. What is the “maintenance” program for kids after they have gone through these programs. Are they independent workers now or do we as parents need to provide additional tutoring throughout they school years?

gk

Thanks momo for the great PACE success story. You’ve been a busy mom helping your daugther. Our children’s challenges sound remarkably similar. I have some of the same questions that the poster qk has listed about transfer to academics and maintenance.

What have you learned about your daughter’s memory problems? Short-term memory seems to be the biggest challenge my son faces. It is also what worries me the most. And I have the least number of ideas or interventions to help him.

Have you looked in to NeuroNet? That has been suggested to me before to help with word retrieval?

Thanks for taking the time to write about your daughter.

Rosie

Momo, I really learn alot from you conscientious parents who have the time or make the time to look under every rock. Eventually some of this will trickle down into public school programs, it takes time. I am encouraged when I read about students like your daughter.

Greetings gk and Rosie,

Sorry for the confusion with the PACE levels. By listing the levels the way I did, I was trying to make it clearer for those reading this post that didn’t have a student workbook in their possession. What I should have said was:

She hasn’t achieved the 5th level of 10 levels in DMC (7.2 in the student workbook); she completed the 5th (8.) & 6th (9.) levels of MDA but can’t do level 4 or 7 (7.2 & 10. in the workbook); nor can she recite all the presidents.

I have been homeschooling my dd for the past year and a half so we have been able to focus on therapies and her academic deficits - primarily reading. The testing done in May at our local ps indicates she still has learning disabilities in oral expression, written expression and math calculation. She also tested low in listening comprehension but not LD. I think the math calculation LD stems primarily from her memory problems as she has been unable to completely learn her math facts nor did she retain all the review work we did this last year. So this tells me even though she truly has made great gains in many deficit areas, she’s not quite there in all of them. As a result of learned helplessness and bottomed out self-respect, my dd learned ‘avoidance’ as a coping strategy and that is still her first response when faced with what previously was a too difficult task. She still seriously doubts her abilities but is amazed and delighted when she accomplishes a difficult task. I’m her cheerleader, constantly reminding her of what she has accomplished and what she can do now. My dd is not yet an independent worker due to her ongoing deficits, but she is definitely working more independently in certain subjects or tasks. Is she comfortable with grade level school work? I don’t know but I believe this coming school year will be the true test. She will be attending the local ps part-time and I will be homeschooling part-time. Other than her language and math curriculum, all other curricula will be at grade level.

I definitely see a marked improvement in her reading ability. While she still exercises some avoidance tendencies (which might be more of finding a book that interests her than anything), she started and finished reading the book The Prayer of Jabez for Teens by Bruce Wilkinson last night. She absolutely could not put it down so I let her stay up late reading! The book is 116pp. long and amazon.com lists it as a young adult reading level. She finished it in 2hrs 15mn.
What joy!! Also, she is now able to read textbooks without buddy reading or experiencing mental or visual fatigue.

For us, the PACE ‘maintenance’ will be continued work on the exercises my dd didn’t accomplish. She will also be receiving 2hrs a week therapy at school from the SLP for her expressive language deficit and she will be doing a visual processing therapy on the computer to give me a break in working one-on-one.
From what I understand though, PACE itself doesn’t necessarily need ongoing maintenance as the cognitive skills exercised in the program are used and exercised everyday at school and work. We moved from PACE to MTC in February but going back to PACE this past week, on the few exercises we’ve done, my dd has picked up right where she left off without losing anything.

Regarding short-term memory, like you I don’t have a great number of ideas or interventions either. With PACE, my dd’s memory has definitely improved, despite not progressing in the memory exercises, but it isn’t at normal levels either. Mnemonics hasn’t been effective. When I give her multi-step instructions, I try to remember to have her repeat the instructions to me to make sure she understood. I also make notes and I’m teaching her to make her own notes but that isn’t consistent or effective enough yet. The visual processing therapy she will begin has a memory component that I pray will be successful. Also, I was looking into TLP and wondering if that would help with auditory memory.

I have also looked at NeuroNet and like what I see but that’s something we can’t pursue at this time. I’m considering Balametrics as an alternative.

If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Blessings, momo

Momo,
I’m curious to know, how much money you have spent on all of these programs? And if you have received any funding (remarkably!) from school, government, etc…

Deanne, who posts here, seems to have got great progress in learning after Tomatis, a sound therapy. I remember her reporting that her daughter made progress with memory on Brainbuilder which she used with her daughter. Tomatis is a sound therapy, an expensive one, I think. I don’t know whether the same results would be true for other sound therapies. TLP is the most reasonably priced of the sound therapies and the mildest.

I looked into sound therapies at one point and had decided on Somanas after much research. Tomatis is not widely available and AIT has a lot of adverse reactions. I also talked to one audiologists who had used both Somanas and AIT and said she got better results, more quickly, with Somanas instead of AIT. We ended up doing Neuronet which used some sound therapy (something from Germany that I had never heard of) so I never pursued it. What we with Neuronet fixed my son’s inability to discriminate where sounds were coming from.

I would say though that if your son doesn’t make adequate progress in memory using PACE that you are going to have to back up and try therapies on a more senory-motor level. We initially got my son’s auditory memory into low normal range with Fast Forward. After that, we made no progress until we did Neuronet. I tried both Earobics and Brainbuilders after FFW with no luck. He just couldn’t progress. Both Earobics and Brainbuilders have memory exercises that have similarities to PACE, although they are computerized.

Testing last fall said my son’s visual memory was in worse shape than his auditory. (more than 2 SD below mean) I see him making real progress here with PACE but is probably because 1. he already had vision therapy which corrected many underlying problems 2. his visual issues seem to be developmental as opposed to congenital. His memory issues are connected to problems in his vestibular system which developed when he was a preschooler which have largely been corrected. In other words, he now has a firm sensory base to build on.

Beth

Thanks so much for your kind words, Anitya. I’ve shared information with the Asst. Superintendent of Personnel and Curriculum who was polite but disinterested. However, one of the Psychological Examiners my daughter saw during her recent testing was VERY interested and asked for additional info. Maybe there is hope!

Blessings, momo

Greetings Barbara,

How much have we spent on all these therapies? ALOT! Seriously, I’m not sure as I haven’t kept a running tab but I do know it’s been over $10k of which we have paid for all expenses with no assistance from school, government, insurance or anything. Nor does that include lost income from quitting my part-time job 2yrs ago in order to work more intensely with my dd. How do we do it? My husband drives an 11yro truck with 150,000+ miles and I drive a 8yro van with 130,000+ miles and our children no longer have a college fund. When my husband and I realized our dd needed specialized help, we vowed we would do whatever it took to help her, just as we would do whatever it took to cure her if she had cancer. Other than money wasted on two separate, private testings which gave us incomplete and inaccurate information, we haven’t regretted a single dime spent on therapies as all of it has been beneficial to varying degrees.

Blessings, momo

This conversation is helping me SO MUCH!! Thank you to everyone here.

As for cost of therapies, tutoring, testing, I think we’ve averaged in the range of $3K - 6K /year for the past 6 years. Some of this expense is due to HMOs that would not cover speech therapy and OT at the time. Although we’ve had plenty of battles, and usually received at least some reimbursment. We were successful in getting reimbursed for FFW. Before my other two children were born I was able to work part-time from my home to help earn money for therapies. When my son was young my husband was in denial and not terribly supportive about spending money on testing and such. He was since come around, and being a lawyer, he has helped with some of the insurance battles. It is amazing how quickly his voice on the phone to an insurance rep. will get results, over the angry, worried mom image that gets projected on to me.

Oops! Need to get off the machine. I’ll be back later.

Rosie

Were you reimburst by you insurance company?
If that is the case, we have no insurance. (my husband has his own business) I’m from Toronto Canada and we have a government funded health plan that does not cover FFW.

Yes, is was a private insurance plan through my husband’s employer. They covered FFW like it was speech therapy.