Is PACE overkill for us?

Is this Dea in Colorado?

$4,000 seems awfully high for PACE unless they are including Master the Code. Around here a 12-week PACE program costs around $2,400. Of course, it would be right around $4,000 with MTC added on.

How old is your daughter, and has she had a CAPD eval? If she hasn’t had a CAPD eval you might want to do that first to find out if she has “auditory decoding deficit”. If she does, you would probably want to do FastForWord before PACE. In general, you want to get all possible sensory/motor therapies out of the way before doing PACE, because sensory/motor development provides the foundation for cognitive gains. I don’t think ease with Earobics would necessarily rule out CAPD problems, and a CAPD eval is usually covered by medical insurance, so I would probably check into that first.

The LMB programs are good but, as you mention, very expensive.

In my opinion, PACE wouldn’t be overkill in your situation. However, it might not be the best choice either. It’s really hard to tell without more information.

Mary

My son is just finishing PACE in 2 weeks. In pre-testing, he scored behind in every area except visual processing. Our Pace provider only charged $2700 and she came to our house. With your child’s relatively good scores in many PACE areas, I’d wait till the summer before you embark on PACE if you decide to do it. It is a challenge to do both school work and PACE. I think you will see more improvement for the money if your child can just focus on PACE. See if the provider is willing to charge you less to just do the auditory components that your child needs. Or, see if you could just be trained on the auditory exercises to do at home. The exercises are VERY easy to do. It is not rocket science. I can imagine doing just 15-20 minutes a day of the auditory exercises at home and getting great benefits. PACE is a lot to put your child through if she doesn’t need it. It may improve and strengthen skills which are already strong, but the time committment and intensity required may not be worth that investment. I’m glad we did it. But, I think it is priced high. BrainSkills which is a home version of PACE is not intended for kids with severe problems, but it might be right for your child. I order it to review before we decided to do the more comphehensive PACE program. It is only $500. www.brainskills.com I’d look at that first. You can do what I did. Order BrainSkills and review it. If you return it within a certain time period (2 weeks?) you get your money back, or if you decide to do PACE instead, they credit your account.

We saw some good improvements with PACE, and I really like the program. But, if I were in your shoes I’d do BrainSkills and save the rest to buy cheap stocks for the college fund. Good Luck,

Rosie

Hi Dea,

I’m trained as a PACE provider but I’ve only trained my 14yo dd. Does your provider recommend doing the entire program? What are the goals for your daughter? How old is she? Did the provider mention anything about PACE’s followup reading program Master the Code? What are your concerns for your daughter?

Blessings, momo

Dea,

I have been trained in PACE…It is a decent program, it just works on the processing piece but doesn’t hit academics…If you are set on doing PACE…then tell them you want the reduced price for doing just the auditory portion IMO that is all she needs…PACE is more kill and drill and considering the cost I feel that you should try FFW before you do PACE.

I can’t believe the price you are being charged, that is outrageous…we didn’t charge that price where I worked last year and she is a trainer for PACE..

With your daughter’s skills being up in other areas, I would spend the money on a private tutor working one on one on segmenting and blending and that is something you could even do with word chains and blocks on your own. See if you can find a speech and language pathologist in your area who has training in Lindamood-Bell or phonology. Any SLP worth her weight should have a good background in phonology to get her over this hump. Have you played games with her that manipulate sounds, you can accomplish a lot through having fun with words….

Phonology is only one piece of the puzzle, having her read with fluency and comprehension is the big picture that you are striving to acheive. That is one thing my reading professor has been telling us…one can teach decoding ‘til the cows come home but you really need to practice in good literature to expand their vocabulary and reading skills.

Now I’m confused, but it confirms my never fail ‘gut’ feeling.

Re: FFW - does FFW have the child practice alot of blending, segmenting, deleting? I don’t feel like Earobics really addressed that - it focused more on discrimination and hearing the different sounds.

I live only 45min away from PACE HQ - I’m now thinking maybe it would be more worth my money to just get trained and then I can pick the exercises to do? We had inquired about only doing a portion of PACE, but we were told you could not break up the program.

Just curious - how long is an average PACE week (i.e. 3days a week for 1hr with trainer? and then 2-3 1hr days homework with parent?) That’s what we were to pay the $4000 for. I was thinking it was suppose to be 90min. 3x per week with trainer?

Hi Dea,

The original Fast ForWord programs for auditory processing problems do not practice blending/segmenting/deleting nor does it teach reading. Scientific Learning Corp is the developer of FFW. In December 2000, they introduced a reading program but I am not familiar with it at all.

I agree with pattim that your child probably only needs PACE’s Auditory Processing exercises, but then I would recommend completing their reading program Master the Code. At the end of 6th grade, my dd was reading at a 3rd grade level. In 7th grade, we did Phono-Graphix at home, which brought her reading level up to about grade 4/5, but she hit a brick wall with multisyllable management. After completing PACE’s AP exercises and MTC, my daughter tested at an 11th grade reading level! She has become a fluent, independent reader. Over the past three weeks, she has read for pleasure seven young adult level books totalling over 1000 pages. That’s in addition to reading her 9th grade levell textbooks (which she couldn’t do before)! The blending/segmenting/deleting drill work to the metronome using both real and nonsense words is what made all the difference for her. Her spelling dramatically improved also.

It definitely would be more economical to become a PACE/MTC provider. That way you can spend more time on what she needs and drop what she doesn’t.

By-the-way, protocol is only one-hour, 3 times weekly with the provider and a minimum of one-hour, 3 times weekly homework with parent.

Blessings, momo

What kind of improvements did you see in spelling/writing? My dd’s writing (and it’s mainly the spelling) is what is below grade level such that she still qualfies for an IEP at school. My hunch is that because her auditory processing is closer to an end of kindergartener vs. a 2nd grader - her spelling looks that level. She makes lots of errors when reading, although still on grade level. I think her errors would go away - and her errors/guessing is because she is compensating with her high visual processing? (Interestingly, the school tested her phonological processing in June and indicated she was above average in all areas except deletion? The PACE tests tells me something different and it matches what a provide evalutation at a reading center at Christmas told me!).

How does MTC program work? Is it same as PACE - 3hrs per week with trainer and 3hrs homework at home? How long for typical program? I know you did yours at home - any guess of typical costs? (I know my provider is very expensive!)

Starting in 2002 they are only going to train providers. Of course, a parent could still train to become a provider by paying the additional fee. If you are seriously interested in taking advantage of the parent-training discount (which was substantial last year — don’t know about this year), you’d better call them immediately to find out if there is a training class you can get into this year.

Since you live in the area, I think it would be foolish to pay someone $4,000 when you could get fully trained yourself for considerably less than that!

Mary

Hi Dea,

We’re doing PACE so here’s my two cents. My son actually scored above age level on the AP type pretests. I was told by Tanya, which makes sense to me, that a kid who has had as much direct instruction as my son (and your daughter) ought to have scored much higher though. The AP portion of PACE has been just what my son has needed. We aren’t through yet but I see his blending segmenting ect. improving a lot!!

There is no reason why you couldn’t do just the AP portion of PACE. It was not even part of the original PACE program. I would either get the training myself or do Brain Skills. When I was trained in PACE, the majority of the other people trained were being trained to do Brainskills at a summer camp run by the center. As I recall, there were only a few exercises less in the AP part of Brain skills. But you could ask the PACE people that directly. The advantage of PACE training is that you could do the rest of it later to up her skills (I really would focus on AP part just to conserve energy since it is school time) and you would have PACE to call for help. My son has had a devil of a time with the AP work and I found their expertise invaluable.

We haven’t done MTC but your daughter is on the young side for it. It is more kill and drill. I talked to the Sarasota clinic which does both PACE and PG about my son. At 8, he is on the borderline between what they generally recommend for the two programs. (advantage of talking to them is that they are not the developer of either one!) What we are going to do is go back to Orlando for another PG intensive after we finish the AP work. My son balked at “another program like PaCE” and wanted to go see the orange trees in Orlando, even if he had to work in the morning. For us, MTC would have been a surer bet but my son had such strong feelings about it that I decided to go along with his wishes. He has had to do an awful lot he hasn’t wanted to do and I thought we could always do MTC later, if necessary.

We did FFW. Frankly, I didn’t see any changes in blending and segmenting. It helped receptive language skills and auditory memory.

Earobics 2 has segmenting and blending on it. We haven’t done it but might do it as follow up to PACE. PaCE is much more intense than Earobics 2 though.

Beth

Brain Skills would be the best option for you. I am a provider and have both programs. Brain Skills contains almost all of the auditory processing drills as PACE, but at a considerably smaller cost. Your daughter would benefit most by doing the entire Brain Skills program, but you could just do the Auditory Processing.

Hi Dea,

MTC uses the sound to letter approach as Phono-Graphix. Beginning at level 10, each level begins and ends with a spelling quiz using words containing the target sound. Students are taught visual pictures to help remember the complex code. For example, the /e/ sound is most commonly spelled as /e/, then /ea/, then /ai/. The visual picture for this sound is a b/e/d on which a piece of br/ea/d is resting and dreaming about a mount/ai/n. Students are also taught visual spelling skills whereby they visual the word and then point to the location of where they are visualizing each letter as the trainer calls out the letters. Another activity includes circling the various spellings of the target sound contained within a group of incorrect spellings. Yet another activity has the student repeat the target word then breakdown each sound in the word. As she says each sound, she points to the correct spelling of the sound shown on the lesson worksheet. And another activity has the student repeat the target word and the write that word with its correct spelling. All of this is combined with drill of the sounds along with real and nonsense words containing the target sounds. It does seem like a lot of drill and kill but in my dd’s case, it was also drill and learn. I strongly believe the drill work is what made all the difference in my dd’s fluency and retention over the previous PG work we did. Of course doing the home version of PG first helped ease the way for MTC.

MTC does not work on reading comprehension but my dd’s reading comprehension did improve to grade level just because she could finally read all the words in the text. MTC does not work on written expression either and I’ve not seen any crossover into that area.

My dd’s auditory processing problems were so severe that I doubt she would have made the great progress with PACE/MTC without first having completed both FFW 1&2. However, PACE providers do work with a lot of children with APD who have not had FFW.

Talked with Tanya and she recommends that I should do either a PACE/MTC combo or Brainskills/MTC combo - but felt the MTC piece was critical.

She recommended that we want to do the entire PACE program vs. just a subset. Since she scores high in many areas, she will probably advance quickly and may be able to complete a number of exercises in a few short weeks -but the program builds/lays foundation for MTC.

I can actually get into a class starting THIS SATURDAY and it will be the last class offered to parents.

For the price delta - it makes the most logical sense for me to just do the training myself. I just am feeling very deflated/overwhelmed. Was so looking forward to not having to be the trainer/tutor going forward!!! (however, I would still have had to do 3 days worth of homework- so am not getting out of that much work.)

Thanks everyone for all the advice- I’ll let you know what I decide. Still need to talk to the provider one last time.

Per my post below, I’m consider getting trained for both PACE/MTC . I feel pretty confident that I can do a decent job on being trainer for PACE.

However, MTC seems more ‘difficult’. I wasn’t that great of Reading Reflex coach? Just couldn’t get into it? Does it require alot of creativity and thinking on the trainers part - or is it more ‘mindless’ follow the directions.

Dea,

Dea,

Just don’t let the fact that this is the LAST class for parents influence your decision too much. The “scarcity principle” makes many things appear very appealing that we otherwise would not. We ended up with several extra sets of silverware in addition to the serving pieces we were buying when we found out the pattern was being discontinued. We almost ended up with shrimp forks and ice tea spoons, except I stood strong against my husband’s “but we’ll never be able to buy it again.” Brainskills may very well be just the thing for your daughter.

See Cialdini “Influence: Science and Practice” for how scarcity can unduly impact our decision making.

I sympathize with your desire to not have to do this program with your daughter. It is a shame your provider feels compelled to charge people so very much. I do think it is easier to have someone else do some of the work. It helps keep the child on track.

Beth

full of drills, drills and more drills. They have a video on MTC that I watched where I worked and it didn’t seems that complicated to implement, of course you need the MTC notebook of drills so you can follow them.