F.A.T. City Video

Thoughts and things I learned about the F.A.T. city video.

Processing

Distractible and lack of focus are not the same thing.  They are very different.  Distracted children are children who are focusing on everything, and children that lack focus aren’t focusing on anything.

Learning disabled children need more processing time.  One way to lessen the anxiety is to let them know that you will not call on them unless you are in front of their desk.  That way, they won’t use all their energy trying to avoid the teacher and stressing about getting called on.

Motivation

Learning disabled children don’t want to take risks because they are so stressed about not understanding what is being said and things are moving at a pace that is too quick for them to process.

Learning disabled children don’t like surprises.  They don’t like to know not know what is coming up next.

Common attitudes of teachers that are not appropriate with a learning disabled child are to:

1.        Look at it harder (tell them to try harder to do something they are not capable of doing)

2.       Bribe or offer to give the child something in order to try to force them to something they are not capable of doing.

3.       Take things away (like recess) for not accomplishing a task they are unable to do.

4.       Blame the victim

Perception

Children who struggle with LD need direct instruction.  They need a teacher to tell them one on one what they need to do.

Vocabulary is not the answer to comprehension, it is the background of the child. 

Visual motor connection:  the coordination of visual perceptual abilities and fine motor control.  Eye hand coordination.

Oral expression:  dysnomia happens to the learning disabled child.  It’s when they cannot come up with the word they want.

Associative task or cognitive task.  You can only do one cognitive task at a time, but can do more than one associative task at a time.  Speaking is usually an associative task for people, but for LD children, it is a cognitive task.  Kind of like driving when the conditions are bad.  Usually it is an associative process, but becomes a cognitive task when the weather is bad.  Speaking is usually an associative task for most people but if you cannot use the letter “n”, it becomes a cognitive process.

If they a bright person and you make it impossible for them to learn, they are quick to “turn someone else in” when they do something wrong.  When you give someone else a task and ignore a mistake, it bothers the LD child because they want to make sure everyone knows that they are not the only one who is struggling.

Give a LD child extra time to process and then call on them first since they may only have one answer.

Spatial orientation is a hard thing for LD children.  A “P” is only a “P” when it is going a certain direction.

Don’t tell a child that a task is easy when they cannot do it.

Don’t use rhetorical questions with children.  “How many times do I need to tell you to keep your hands to yourself?”  It is intimidating and there are no answers to the questions.  It breaks down communication.

When reading is a cognitive activity as opposed to an associative task, all the child’s energy and effort it put into decoding the words but not comprehension.

Many children need auditory input in addition to visual.  They cannot understand it until they hear it.

Fairness means every child gets what they need, not the same thing.  When teachers say that an LD child cannot have something because it is not possible to give the same thing for the other children, it is no different than saying that the child having a cardiac arrest cannot have CPR because the other children could not have it.  The fact is that the other children don’t need it.

Children learn more about honesty, truth, patriotism etc. based on the actions of parents and teachers more than all the reading or teaching in the world.