PACE & LMB question

Laura, I don’t know the answer for sure, but I like your logic here regarding Lindamood Bell and would tend to agree. You could always call LB and ask, though.

Janis

From what I’ve gathered, it seems like LMB’s strength is decoding skills, but I can’t recall if their program is helpful for fluency. And yet, if decoding has been “overtaught” at an intensive level (with visualization skills strengthened) it seems like fluency should follow. Is that realistic logic, what might I be missing?

I’m worried LMB may not be a good choise in trying to make progress in fluency and automatic pattern recognition — and yet logically it seems like it might be helpful.

LiPS does the phonemic awareness part and Seeing Stars is for fluency…automatic word recognition. They use the words “sight words” on the site, but they do not mean “sight words” like irregular words, they mean automatic word recognition. Seeing Stars is perfect for what you are talking about. I am taking the training in Nov. and I can hardly wait!

Janis

Janice,
Good luck with the training!

I’m suppose to take my son for testing (at LMB) next week. It has been a tough decision because I hate the idea of paying so much money and not getting any results. I know it probably won’t “fix” the problem, but I’ m hoping for a jump in progress.

Well…it should be interesting.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Ooooops! I meant Janis!!!! Gosh, maybe I could use some SS! :wink:

Laura, when I looked at LMB their research results are supporting gains in decoding/comprehension but if you check their charts there is virtually no gain in reading speed, which would be fluency. However, from what I understand- gaining fluency takes much longer time that LMB training (even when one can sustain the financial drain I do not suppose one can go there for 4 hours - or even couple of hours a day for a couple of years). So I think your logic is good only what is missing from that equation is time.
Ewa

I get the feeling I am banging my head against the wall on this topic, but please, fluency is not equal to speed. Speed is nice but speed without accuracy goes AGAINST fluency. In this case I think the LMB people are on the right track — you shouldn’t even be trying to increase speed until all the other building blocks are in place. In fact, it is often necessary to force students to slow down, a lot, to get accuracy. As I continue to ask my students, what’s the value of a really fast mistake? Speed can be worked on later if needed — although with most of my students speed comes on its own after the other bad habits are gotten out of the way.

Victoria,
reading rate is defined as CORRECT words read per minute; thus, this is not reading fast with errors.

Ewa

Yes, correct words per minute is a reasonable way to measure reading rate. Two big problems in the real world of the classroom: First, many teachers have been told not to correct students as part of the whole language approach, so they just measure words, any words, and boy are these kids hard to remediate, almost impossible by grade 4. Second, many students and a number of teachers realize that if you read absolutely accurately twenty words per minute your score is 20, but if you rush, guess, and mumble through a hundred words per minute you can probably get fifty of the base words right and fifty wrong, and the net score is 50, for a huge “gain” in score — total loss of meaning, but who cares as long as the score goes up? There has to be some check on the rate of errors and a stop if meaning is out the window. I believe Ken’s Great Leaps work does involve this, if properly applied. The speed stuff I see in common use, however, is worse than useless, absolutely counterproductive.

Laura,

PACE itself doesn’t seem to affect RAN—at least in my experience and several other people I know. However, I do have a friend who did PACE and MTC with her daughter with very good results. She was 12 and read at a fourth grade level. Her mother home schooled her and two years later she was reading at above grade level. She had documented RAN issues. PACE does do some visualizing but not as much as Seeing Stars. MTC is a learning patterns to a metronome—kill and drill, as they say. There is extreme repetition which made a big difference with her daughter. They had used PG before.

Beth

Beth,
you have remediated your son’s RAN- through NN- it was a combination of “body-work” and drills? I know you wrote about it already- but would you mind summerizing?

Thank you, Ewa

Victoria,

I do not think that any mother or teacher that posts here would take a route that you describe when looking for fluency. When we quote the reading rates we are aware that the reader should not make more than 2-3 errors/100 words. Text that is read with 5 errors/100 words is a frustration level and nobody measures the rate of reading (fluency) on the material that is at the frustration level.

Ewa

Ewa,

Yes, we made tremendous progress with Neuronet with RAN, along with IM. My son tested 10% on Test of Word Finding. Two years later he was in the 49% (can’t remember standard scores).

The exercises were what were termed fast naming. It was a sheet of paper with twenty six boxes (5x5 with last divided into two). Each square had a picture starting with that letter of the alphabet that the child draws. The child is timed naming the pictures. He does it three times. Children with integration issues get worse rather than better.

We did many variations of this—bouncing on a ball, stool ect, and with and without rhyming. Can’t even remember them all. I do know that we hit a wall with these exercises about 1 1/2 years ago. Most kids are normal after about 6-10 rounds of these exercises. My son must have done twenty and the times had dropped but then stabilized. We did IM at that point. For some reason, it made a big difference and he was able to get his scores down in the normal range (less than thirty seconds on first three tries) within a few months. IM did not impact RAN directly but facilitated NN.

My theory—try and try again. If it still doesn’t work, try something else.

Beth

Beth,
thanks a lot. Will try.

How many charts did you do per session? One chart- three times, (i.e. one letter) or several of them?

When done with bouncing et.c. this becomes more of an integration exercise- doesn’t it? I know he would love doing it while jumping on a trampoline….

My son is at the 9-%ile now; thus, any improvement will more likely help since he is clearly frustrated that he cannot find words quickly enough.

Funny, but his school will give him something comparable this year- they will have a new fluency when they have to name all the students and teachers based on their pictures-pure retrieval. They also introduced a new fluency with reading nonsense words/syllables. Only thing missing- no movements et.c- thus no integration.

Ewa

It’s good that you and your son are working with people who will not let more than five errors per 100 words pass. This is indeed a good place to work from.
Many of us unfortunately are out here dealing with much less responsible people.
My present young adult student misses at least ten words per hundred while I am watching him like a hawk, and I don’t know how many but probably up near fifty percent when left to “read” silently on his own. He tells me he thinks he reads better “in his head” rather than out loud; considering the results of his work, I think that he is making the entire thing up rather than reading.
One of my “normal” students, whom I am coaching in French, not English, also makes at least ten errors per hundred words.

Ewa,

Your son is about like mine before we did NN with RAN. The exercise the school is talking about doing is actually harder than what we did. I am not great with names—and I think lots of people have more trouble with names than other things.

Here is a bit more detailed description.

1. Make a sheet of five by five boxes. Divide the last box diagonally.
2. The child should draw a picture for each box corresponding to the letter of the alphabet. It is easier to recall one and two syllable words so start there. So you have a picture of an apple, boat, cookie, dog, egg, farm, ect. It doesn’t matter what. I used a children’s dictionary to help. Sometimes we did themes—everything about the dog—just to keep it amusing. You need to write down what the child says the pictures are.
3. Get a good timer. We use one from RAdio Shack. Have the child name the pictures. Write the time down. Repeat 2 times.
4. We used to do this every day for two weeks. Then we’d do rhyming. So he’d look at the picture of apple and say red, bed. He’d write bed on the square and have to recall the red. The next one boat might be boat, float. Again, he’d write float on the square. We’d do this for two weeks.
5. The idea is to decrease the time in which you get all times under thirty seconds. It would take us two weeks at first and then eventually it was days. And finally, he could do it in one day. We went to multisyllable words after one and two syllable words.
6. He sometimes did this with bouncing on a big ball (exercise one). You could use a trampoline too.
7. I know that she doesn’t give this exercise to children who do not have a certain level of integration to start with. Look on the web site…there is a conversation with therapists that talks about what would preclude fast naming exercises. What was odd about my son was that he didn’t test that badly but that we had so much trouble improving this.

You can email me privately if you want more information or have more questions ([email protected]).

Beth

Beth,
thanks a lot.
My son has a long weekend (Fri. and Mon. off) in Oct., so I will prepare everything needed and start that weekend.

Ewa

Beth,
Thanks for sharing that info again. I remember you posting it before but we were so busy with other things that I never got around to using your suggestions. Like Ewa, I really need to try to and incorporate some exercises that may help my son’s RAN deficit.

Last night I had an interesting experience with Dr. Fischer’s Fluency Drills. The words we went over were short/long i. Here’s the first line:
rid ride hid hide kit kite ride hide rid hid kit
The directions for the fluency drills are to go quickly and
record errors, but I’ve found if Ian practices something
incorrectly he has an extremely difficult time learning it
correctly, so I have him read, and if necessary re-read,
words correctly. Well…..he went over this line for 10
minutes and could not read the entire line correctly (even
at a slow pace!). Each time he made an error he’d start
over. He never made it to the last word. I then asked him
to say “yes” when he saw “e” at the end of a word and “no”
when he didn’t. He had no trouble quickly and accurately
going over a few lines of words.

Something about this seemed really significant to me. Even though we’ve drilled phonics and have worked on this type of thing for the last two years, I can’t help thinking there’s a severe problem with sound symbol/recognition. When I say fluency here, I’m not talking about speed, but just slow careful reading.

Laura,

How does he do on a line of words that are all short i or long i not mixed?

Janis

Laura,

when I did similar drills with my son I had a line at the bottom of the page with all the words present in a particular drill and before we started timed drill I had him read the line slowly so he will know what words to expect- I would not drill him until he can read the entire line WITHOUT mistakes effortlessly.

From the experience you describe I would lower the number of words alternating only between kit and kite in various arrangements; once this is mastered to a speed you like (when my son was 9 I was aiming at ~80 wpm) with no more than 2-3 errors I will add another pair et.c. I would think that from what you describe he knows the rule and notices “e” at the end of the word and no “e” but I think he cannot quickly retrieve and sequence all the sounds.

Thus, do you know that he can retrieve all the sounds quickly? In my son’s school they do not start drills for words/passages until the child knows all the sounds to automaticity- they had drills just for sounds – which I think is based on LIPS.
http://www.tli.com/TLI_Fad.html
My son did not have it because he has enough phonemic skills to go directly to words- he had sounds drills with his tutor a year before he started in the new school.

Janis suggestion will also test whether he can retrieve sounds quickly.

Correcting mistakes- when we started drills my son COULD NOT FOR LIFE to correct just the word he misread- he would go back and start from the beginning of the line (or beginning of the drill); for passages- beginning of the sentence or paragraph. It took him over a year to gain the skills to re-read just the word he is pronounced.

Ewa

Well….the other night we went over the long/short i combination a second evening and my son did slightly better, but still had some difficulties and frustrations. He told me that it was really difficult to think about “r” and “d” when he had to think about “i.” It was really nice that he was able to explain this to me. Most of the time he cannot explain his difficulty with reading.

Tonight I had him read long i and short i seperately and he did have a MUCH easier time (he was able to read them very quickly). Then I had him read the combination page and it was more difficult, (yet not as difficult as the first night!).

The funny thing is I’ve been using these fluency drills for a little while (more difficult vowel teams), but he didn’t seem to have so much difficulty. It’s funny how his automaticity in recognizing these patterns is so uneven.

Laura
Please stay away from PACE. Been there…done that…with my now 11 year old RAN deficient son (tests at 1%tile on RAN tests!) PACE was a total waste of time (and what’s more important, we wasted a summer on PACE, instead of real reading program.)

My son has taken LMB a(Lips and VV) nd I have high regard for all of their programs. But of course, they don’t address RAN.

I have been searching for years for RAN programs, and RAN is truly the stepchild of the teaching reading programs.

The only thing I have found - and I’m not sure if it has become commercially available yet…is a program by Dr. MaryAnne Wolf of Tufts Univeristy (you can find her articles in Annals of Dyslexia). She has been running her RAVE-O program in city schools for several years. You might email the university and see if the RAVE-O program is available yet.

If you find that RAVE-O is available commercially or you find other programs, please let me know. email: [email protected]

Best of luck
Kathleen

I’m not going to get into a PACE debate, for one thing I don’t know anything about it (hey why not never stopped me in the past :-)). But one of the beauties of the LMB programs is they do deal directly with processing. Now if the kid is ADD inattentive, that’s another story. But they deal with the processing straight on, only they use reading or whatever to deal with it. I’d say the same thing for something with a strong phonemic awareness component (say the Barton system) or HWTears which would strengthen a kid’s visual motor processing thru teaching hand writing. The teaching of processing and a specific skill is NOT mutually exclusive but depends on how it is done.

—des

Kathleen,
Thanks for sharing that PACE was not helpful for your son’s RAN deficit.

It’s a shame there’s not more research or programs designed to address RAN deficit since I think there are probably more struggling readers with this problem than recognized.

I haven’t heard of RAVE-O being available yet. And I’ve wondered if it’s something that will actually be available to the general public. From what I’ve read it sounds like a fairly structured program. And the computer game Speed Wizards being developed and used in the program is only one portion of it. I think they’re also using decodable texts. I’d be curious to know which ones or if these texts are something they’ve developed. When I spoke with them, they said the program could be replicated at home.

Des,
ADD inattentive…. I have a question about this. I’m wondering if the medications used for ADHD and ADD are similar? I’m just curious because the behaviors associated with each are quite different. Although both are attentional and I’m assuming due to a lack of dopamine in the brain? I’m a little ignorant here!

Also, with regard to ADD inattentiveness, how specifically might it impact reading? What about memory? That seems obvious, but are there specific traits or problems one might be able to say, “That’s most definitely a symptom of ADD!”

The meds are used for my kids who are ADD-Inattentive are stimulants. They tried Strattera but it was a bust.

The brain of an ADD-Inattentive person kind of roams, you can be reading and your brain takes a vacation so there goes the comprehension and the memory. My daughter could make the connections of the sounds with the symbols for reading but she had a difficult time with reading fluency until we tried meds.

A person who is ADD-Inattentive can hyperfocus at times and other times they check out and take a vacation. I have talked to many kids who explain to me that they can’t stop it when their brain decides to take a vacation as it happens so fast.

Kathleen,

We did PACE also without tremendous success but I have a friend whose daughter had RAN issues who followed up with MTC. The tremendous repetition seemed to really help and she ended up reading on grade level (she was 14 when she was retested, having read on a fourth grade level before PACE and MTC). The only real change we saw with PACE was speed of visual processing. We did not follow up with MTC because we were too burned out, having struggled terribly with the auditory processing exercises (my son has APD).

My son tested at 10% on RAN. The most effective intervention we found was Neuronet combined with Interactive Metronome. We did exercises with Neuronet but hit a wall that Interactive Metronome got us through. Afterwards, (two years later) my son tested at 49% on RAN.

He still isn’t a normal reader—doesn’t stop always at periods and the like and doesn’t have normal expression. He has a rather flat affect when he reads. But he was reading at about 35 wpm 2 1/2 years ago and he is about 120 now. His comprehension is normal (we have done interventions for this too.)

Beth

Beth

i just heard Maryanne Wolf speak, she seemed to be promoting her program, and gave little info but i would not hold my breath, her program sounds like more of the same and she relies heavily on “word families” which i do not use when tutoring,

what i want to know, if Wolf was funded by NICHD, how can she sell a program and take the profits??

but i was not impressed, i use PG and nothing so far has impressed me more than PG has and continues to,

libby

Well I can’t speak of the current controversy and who is what, but word families isn’t a particularly effective approach for dyslexic kids nor for some pretty typical kids who are not at all dyslexic. It doesn’t really teach the SOUNDS of the language. It might work ok early on but then the skills are going to break down somewhere along the line (maybe 3-4th grade) when they can no longer memorize the words and the pitiful amt of “phonics” that this is, won’t help them either.

I am not tutoring in word families either.

—des

Hi Libby,
PG is excellent and I’d definitely be the first to recommend it, but for a kid with a severe RAN deficit, even PG may not be enough. A couple of months after finishing PG my son had some testing which indicated that his phonological processing and blending were above 160 which, I was told, was considered “genius.” And yet, even with this my son can’t read at grade level and his progresses much slower than his peers.

I read Maryanne Wolfe’s research papers and from what I’ve gathered her Word Wizards program is based on Phyllis Fischer’s Speed Drills. Although these are designed orthographically, I didn’t find them similar to word families (or at least the types of word families based materials I’ve come across).

I think Dr. Fischer’s Speed Drills are great! In fact, they make an excellent companion program to use with PG or SS (that it, for those students who persist in having difficulties with orthographic recognition).

I agree with you about the profits issue! How can programs funded in this manner not be more affordable and available?

Laura, I agree with you on the need for speed drills for some kids. I have a student with severe fluency issues and I’ll be using SS, Fischer’s speed drills, and Great Leaps with him after PG.

Janis

Hi again Laura
I had a special opportunity to do an abbreviated RAVEO training. You CAN do (most) this at home. If you can, find the Annals of Dyslexia (International Dyslexia Assn) for about 2 years ago (sorry, I’m on the road and don’t have the year) that features about 6 articles by Dr. Wolf. Another helpful book I just got was Dyslexia, Fluency and the Brain edited by Dr. Wolf. In the Annals, she outlines the various facets of her program and you can replicate all at home (except the computer game). In the meantime, one card game you might get is Professor Wahoo’s Wacky Word Lab (maybe $12?). You’ll have to do a google search to find it. If you want details on the components of RAVEO that I use,contact me directly by email and I’ll give you my phone number and I can give you details. Back in town on Thursday. KathleenW ([email protected])

Hi Kathleen,
I think I have those articles. And, coincidentially, I have the Wahoo Word Lab! It’s made by Trend.

One more thing. Have you tried exercises designed to stimulate the cerebellum? I’ve been doing some research on this and am very curious about it. I know it has been popular lately because of the recent news coverage on these exercises (I think it was the DORE clinc, but I believe the original research was done by Belgau?). I think it may be one of the successful components in vision therapy and Neuronet may use some of the exercises. I’m not sure of the connection between RAN and the cerebullum, but I think for my son he may have weaknesses with both.

Here are some links I came across:

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/database/dysupdate.html
http://www.dyslexia-teacher.com/NASA.html
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,5500,878404,00.html
http://www.ddat.co.uk/DORE/_Rainbow/documents/ResearchStudy3.pdf
http://www.aowm73.dsl.pipex.com/dyslexics/exercise.htm
http://www4.fosters.com/health/articles/2003/health_0717a.asp

Neuronet uses the balance board designed by Beluga. He also makes a rotational board to NN specifications.

There is def. something to this line of work, although I personally don’t think it is a substitute for good instruction. My son is just so much more neurologically organized. We have seen major improvement in fluency with NN but it does not teach decoding. We have pursued that separately. So I think gains that are shown in reading level to be because the child is more efficienctly using what they know, which means somebody still has to teach them to read.

We have seen more direct impact on working memory. My child learns much more efficiently than he did prior to NN.

Beth

I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to read many of the posts in this thread, so hope I am not repeating or stepping on anyone’s toes.

In my experience, REAL rapid naming deficits respond only to bodywork — occupational therapy, sensory integration therapy, Interactive Metronome, NeuroNet, Dore, even DDR (see other thread about this video game that promotes movement activities). What these therapies have in common is body movement.

I say REAL rapid naming deficits, because lags in cognitive skills acquisition can look like RAN problems. From what I have seen, real RAN problems affect many more activities than just reading — things like naming objects in pictures, naming colors, reacting quickly in physical game situations, etc. When a child is pretty good at these other things, but simply has speed issues when reading, then this is much more likely to be a cognitive skills issue — especially in the area of visual processing — that will be responsive to a program like PACE.

PACE will help cognitive skills, but it really does not address at all underlying RAN problems. For true RAN, body work is necessary to stimulate underlying neurological development.

I have tutored a couple of children who appeared to have real RAN problems, and my observations lead me to believe bodywork is the key to optimal remediation of reading fluency. Without it, fluency seems to be very difficult to achieve, as even after they can read (and, in one case, even after cognitive training) they do not seem able to process visual symbols fast enough to be considered within a normal range.

Nancy

Nancy,

You describe my son. He was slow at naming pictures and every other fast naming task you could devise. It was body work that brought him into a normal range, in our case Neuronet and Interactive Metronome. IM did not directly impact RAN, but seemed to help with the neurological organization in a way that facilitated the work we were doing with Neuronet. We had hit a wall with NN, that IM helped us get through. We had done PACE and I would agree it did nothing for RAN.

Beth

Beth,

I think I forgot to tell you this, but LMB is expects Seeing Stars to increase RAN, by the way.

Janis

I am as anxious as any parent to find the “magic bullet” that will “cure” my son’s dyslexia. I stupidly wasted my time on PACE because although I couldn’t find any science behind it, it just sounded so logical and good. I was wrong. One summer wasted. A summer I could have been giving him effective reading tutoring. The books I mentioned above (plus Sally Shaywitz’ book) detail the science behind reading challenges (including science which appears in PEER REVIEWED publications. These books outline what programs work and why they work. I’m going back to basics with my son who has RAN deficits. What works is (from my reading of the science) is repeated exposure (4 exposures for normal readers…how many for our dyslexic kids?) to a given word. This allows that word to move from the stage where they have to sound it out (which uses one part of the brain - the “slow” part) to the stage where the recognition of that word becomes automatic (then it’s stored in the part of the brain that allows that word to be much more quickly retrieved (no further need to sound out or think about that word - much like how my son plays a familiar piano piece vs. one he’s struggling to learn). I’m going back to basics - the RAVE-O components, Great Leaps, Read Naturally, Fisher’s Concept Phonics (maybe not exciting, but the science is there to support these kind of programs) IMHO :)
KathleenW

PS One of the interesting studies done in the book Dyslexia, Fluency and the Brain compared two groups of children who were given reading instruction - one to practice a set of words in context, and one to practice the same/similiar in isolation. I don’t recall all the variables, but the bottom line was that the kids who learned those practice words in isolation did just as well as those who learned them in context. So to me that means that I will use my time wisely and practice those words in isolation (thus a greater reliance on Great Leaps and Fisher’s and RAVE-O though I still like the variety provided by Read Naturally.

It works on intergrating the auditory and visual piece at the same time.

We did PACE too but my daughter found the metronome irritating. I can’t say it helped that much but I was willing to try anything. What really helped was combining the LMB LiPS and Seeing stars with Read Naturally and doing lots of reading on her own has improved her reading speed and fluency.

My son definitely fits the description of someone with low RAN. Also, testing, revealed that his areas of weakness are RAN, word retrieval, and cognitive fluency. These are all extremely low (RAN 1%ile, word retrieval, and cognitive fluency less than 15%ile). While most other areas tested at 99.9%ile with numerous scores above 140 and some as high as 165.

It’s very frustrating and plain mind-boggling just how intensively a severe RAN deficit can affect learning.

I do think Seeing Stars is helping. Unfortunately doing it yourself at home is slow. Even with 1 to 1-1/2 hours a day of SS it is going to take us a looooong time to get through this program. But, we are seeing some progress and that’s encouraging. My intuition tells me that adding a little body work every day can’t hurt, may help and might be a nice little break for my son between things (ex: 1 hr SS, 5 min bodywork, 10 min Sequential Spelling, 5 min bodywork, 20 min reading, 5 min bodywork, etc….).

Does this sound like too much work? Should I be seeing more progress from the amount of work we do? I’ve been working with him for two years now (although level of intensity and approach has varied). Last night I listened to a speaker talk about her Orton-Gillingham based program. One thing that struck me is she said that after 18 months of tutoring twice a week, the students are at level or above grade level in reading and writing. This made me wonder if I’m doing something wrong or am just not very effective….or the RAN deficit presents a more unique set of reading difficulties which really does require a longer and more intensive approach.

Just to add my 2 cents - In my school program we are doing Seeing Stars for a half hour a day, five days a week. For my son, Read Right which requires repeated efforts at excellent reading and moves beyond the decoding practice to reading fluently has been effective. AND, reading is still a tedious task, but what he does read is better, longer, etc….

Wow!!!! How nice to have the school provide this!!!! I forgot if your son is at a public or private school. Also, what city? Gosh!!! No one here does SS. There’s a new VERY expensive tutoring center in my area that offers OG, but that’s it!

My son has similar improvement, but it’s very gradual. Also, I notice when text has more difficult words (not necessarily mutisyllable, but tricky vowel teams and such) he still really has a difficult time.

My son is in private school because our old public district had nothing in terms of programs. What I could do after school was just not enough. His private school does a mixed program. My job is with a public school district in San Diego that provides one-to-one instruction for two hours a day, five days a week for roughly two years!! Individual schools are being helped to set up one-to-four programs for students. Solid, consistent, intensive instruction every day….it is my dream come true. Unfortunately, my son does not live in the district I teach in, but I have learned so much and we are helping so many children. Other districts could definitely do the same thing, if they wanted to.