Pace

Lisa, I don’t have time to post a long message now but you could do a search over the last 90 days on this board and the “teaching reading” board to find out more about this program. I did it with my, than, 11 year old son, including the Master the Code program and was VERY pleased with it. Of course, you need to know what problems your son has and then decide if Pace will address those problems.

Let me know if you need more info after your search.
Donna in MO

We had an extremely rewarding experience with PACE. My dd went through it when she was 9yo.

You do want to be reasonably sure there are no major sensory/motor level problems unaddressed. In our case, dd had done vision therapy for 8 months to bring visual efficiency skills up to age-appropriate levels. Any sensory/integration or fine motor skills problems should be addressed first via occupational therapy. In some cases, it’s a good idea to do sound therapy for auditory disorders before doing PACE.

Mary

We did PACE last summer with our 8 year old son. Our experience was a bit of a mixed bag. I think it is a good program, if you can do it. OUr son plataued early and never got beyond a certain point, which for the most part, was not at age level. We had improvements in visual processing and processing speed (from post tests) and I see improvements in his ability to deal with multi-syllable words.

There is no doubt in my mind that a large part of the problem was unresolved sensory-motor problems. We have been doing Neuronet therapy for almost a year now. At the time we began PACE it was about five months. My son could keep time and both we and the therapist agreed that he was ready to it. We have since had to back up and address problems we didn’t (or the therapist) didn’t know existed.

We are now doing The Listening Program and see some good results. If your child has auditory processing issues, I would recommend doing some sort of sound therapy first. Dea, who posts on these boards, had her daughter do Tomatis first and she just flew through the program.

I got trained in PACE so we can return to it. The problem is it wore us out, especially since it became very frustrating.

If I had to do it again, I would have waited a year and finished the therapy we were doing first. Of course, PACE also pointed out some areas of weaknesses that we weren’t aware of (despite all the testing we had done) so we may have had some of the same problems a year later.

PACE has a number of multi tasking procedures. My son couldn’t do most of them though.

Beth

To clarify my primary quesiton. I am very interested in doing Pace but I am concerned about his age. He is 6 1/2 and I don’t want to start the program too early. He is beginning to read and his sensory motor skills are strong. Any experience with this?

Lisa,

Some of the multi tasking PACE activities require that a child know how to add and subtract. Later levels are multiplication. We ran into problems because my son wasn’t automatic (at age 8) at addition so it was tough to do two things at once. That could be one concern, depending on your child’s skills.

A second is that PACE is designed for children 6 and up. The lowest levels are supposed to be the six year old level. Since he is 6, you might find him having trouble with this level. In other words, there may not be any easy levels for him which might be very frustrating. This, of course, depends on his profile. You could get a sense of this by doing the PACE pretests. If he is above age level in several areas, then you know that there will be some things easy for him. I think this is important to help keep them motivated.

Personally, I think 6 is very young for this program.

Beth

I also think that 6 is very young for this program. I would wait until he is at least 8. It can be done earlier, but I don’t think you get enough out of it then to be worth the time and energy. And most families do not want to do it twice!

Mary

We tossed around the idea of doing PACE at age 6 3/4 as well. I really felt it was too intense for a 6 even 7 year old. We intentially waited until our dd was 8.

I would suggest working on the sensory issues first(integration, motor, auditory, visual). You might want to even consider Audiblox in the short term. We did Audiblox at age 7.

You should also consider the experience of the trainer you are going to use. How long have they been doing the program, what is the typical age of the children they have trained etc.

Well - I met with the provided and paid the fee last night so I wish I had a little more time to read your comments before decideing what we were going to do!!..There were some timing issues. We are going to try the program now (since we have now paid) but based on everyone’s comments I am a little concerned. Has anyone had experience with success with the younger ones? I am going to be wasting my time and energy?? With regard to the PACE pretesting he scored very high in some areas - in one instance at 12 years old performance but on multi-tasking he was over two years behind. He can read (modestly) and writes very well but does not yet know addition/subtraction facts in his head - he counts it out or uses hands. Are we going to benefit from this or is this going to be a waste of time and money?! Obviously now that we’re in I’ll give it a 100% and luckily my son’s teacher doesn’t believe in a lot of homework so at least we won’t be spending hours burdening ourselves with both but I want this program to be effective! Comments?

I became a PACE provider to provide PACE for my son. My dd, who at the time was 5, kept begging me to teach her to read. I decided to do some of the PACE tasks with her. Sure, some of the task she wasn’t able to do because of her age but I found that she could do a lot.

I believe that doing PACE at this early age really helped to lay down the foundation skill that my dd needed to learn to read. Her ablility to hear the sounds in the words and her knowledge of the letter sounds were all helped with the PACE tasks. She is now, one of the top readers in her class which I feel is because of exposure to these PACE tasks.

I am helping out in the kindergarten class which my dd attends. The kids age range from 5 to 6 1/2. I am using some of the PACE tasks with these kids and are seeing excellent results.

I am not recommending that kids do PACE at 5. But, I don’t think that you will be disappointed. PACE will address the areas that you are concerned about.

Donna in MO