F. A. T. City Video Summary

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F.A.T. City is a workshop held by Richard Lavoie, an expert on learning disabilities, that let’s an audience experience the frustration, anxiety, and tension children with learning disabilities deal with every day. In this video, Mr. Lavoie does several activities with the audience to let them experience what it’s like to be a child with a learning disability in the classroom. The setting of this video is a traditional classroom setting. It’s sunny outside and morning or afternoon. There are two big green chalkboards at the front of the room and posters hung all over the walls. The desks are arranged in a big u shape with the audience sitting around them and the teacher in the front sitting on a stool. Throughout this video the teacher is …show more content…

He quickly shows everyone a picture of an uppercase Hearn and tells them to try and reproduce it. He then has two women come to the front and sit down and look into a mirror and try to trace it. Neither of them are successful due to mixed messages between their hands and eyes. This activity shows how difficult it is for a child with a learning disability to write. The eighth activity is oral expression. He starts talking very fast, stuttering, and having trouble finding the right words to say to show how a child with a learning disability would respond when asked a question. Most children with learning disabilities have dysnomia, which is a word finding problem. They have problem with their storage and retrieval systems in the brain, which is what makes it difficult sometimes to retrieve or find the right words. For most people talking is associative, meaning they can do more than just talk at one time. But for children with learning disabilities, its cognitive meaning they can just do that at one time. He plays “popcorn” with the participants and asks them to say a sentence that tells a story and relates to the one in front of it. This was associative for everyone, so to make it cognitive and to show everyone what it’s like to be dysnomic, he tells them to do the same thing

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