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AIDS: Let's Talk |
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Audience:
Children, Multi-Racial
Year:
1989
Speech Rate:
170 words/min
Large Words
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This video presents a dramatization in which Bart, a White male adolescent, discovers two children, Tommy and Suzy, teasing each other about AIDS ("Tommy has AIDS!"). Assisted by a television talk-show (with a Black boy and White girl as hosts, and two puppets as medical experts), Bart explains to Tommy and Suzy why they should take AIDS seriously.
The principal messages of the video are: (1) AIDS is mainly a disease of adults. Some children get it, but only through receiving a blood transfusion or by getting it from their mother before they are born. (2) AIDS is a serious disease. What makes it so serious is that doctors haven't found a medicine to keep people from getting AIDS yet, and once they get it we don't have any medicine to cure it. Once you get AIDS you can never get over it. (3) AIDS is hard to catch. The only way you can get AIDS is for the virus to enter your blood stream. Nobody ever got AIDS just because they went to school with somebody who had it. So if you ever have someone with AIDS in you school or church, there's nothing to be afraid of. (4) People should go out of their way to be friends with kids who have AIDS. Some kids do have AIDS, but it's not because they did anything wrong. Think how someone with AIDS might feel if they heard you teasing everyone about it. Or supposing you had a brother or a friend who died from AIDS. Think how much it would hurt to hear someone making fun of AIDS. That's why name calling isn't a good idea. Kids with AIDS are just like everyone else, the only difference is they have a real serious disease. They have to spend a lot of time in the hospital, but other times they are able to go to school. The best thing to do is to treat them the same way you like to be treated when you're sick. The video provides a good introduction to AIDS for elementary school-age children. Dramatization, humor, and puppets are used effectively to explain why AIDS is a serious problem, why most children don't have to fear getting the disease, and why they should have compassion for children with AIDS. The video does not provide explicit information about AIDS transmission through sexual contact or sharing needles. The focus is on encouraging children not to be afraid of people with AIDS. Although the cast of characters includes an Asian girl (Suzy) and an African American boy (Billy, one of the talk show hosts), most characters (including the puppets) are White. The video will probably be more relevant to children from a middle-class background than those with lower socioeconomic status. Technically, the video is of high quality. |
Go to video listings for:
African Americans
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