

Basic braille
Where is Lily?
Lily is playing on the beach, but Alfie, her dog, has lost her!
Teaching braille
Visually impaired children can learn to read in braille while their sighted peers learn to read in print. Here are a few steps to help mainstream teachers begin with teaching braille. One piece of advice? Don’t be afraid!
Too many people (parents, teachers, practitioners) think that braille is difficult to learn. But braille is just a different letter code for a different way of reading. Different, not more difficult. A blind child with no additional impairments would learn to read at the same time than their sighted friends.
“The first piece of advice I can give is not to be afraid and to use common sense. It’s not about being perfect.”
Isabelle d’Allemagne, TVI, Grenoble France
The mainstream teacher will read braille with their eyes. The blind child must be prepared to read with fingertips.
Skills like line tracking and use of both hands are absolutely essential, prior to learning characters.
This can be done with easy everyday exercises. The aim is that the child can follow a line with both hands, and find the following line easily with a good understanding of the surface of the page.
These activities with LEGO Braille Bricks help begin :
The order in which the letters are taught is important. It is not advisable to learn the letters in the same order as sighted children. It is possible, but more difficult.
Some letters are easier to decipher tactilely:
a, with only one dot, b, c with 2 dots, l with 3 dots in a column.
Then we recommend the letters g, k, x. With only a few sessions the child will know 7 letters.
During the sessions, vary the reading and writing exercises. This will help the student to think of a letter with different entries: the letter is read globally with the finger, but to write it, they need to know the patterns of the dots. These exercises can be done with LEGO Braille Bricks and other supports.
Braille
Vowel and Consonant Towers
A, B, C, D… you know your alphabet! But can you separate vowels and consonants?
Braille
Word Tower
How many letters will you need to guess the secret word?
The child is very soon ready to learn to read and write their first name. Very quickly, they will know half of the letters of the alphabet.
The rest is similar to classic phonics reading exercises. But note that whole reading is impossible in braille, you can’t see the whole word, you have to decipher it bit by bit as the letters appear on the fingertips.
My advice is don’t
be afraid and use a lot of common sense.
“So in this game, you’ve got bricks.
And what can you see on the bricks?
Just equal signs okay?”
Very quickly
you start to think how can I help them.
But there are lots of very simple things
you can do.
Just putting someone next to them
who can say what they need
rather than saying to yourself,
oh, they won’t be able to do it.
But you mustn’t worry
that they won’t do everything.
They’ll always
take something away with them.
“It does make ten.
So you win.
So you take the bricks, take them off.”
Often people say to me,
oh, I don’t want to do that.
For example, on the geography, because I
show them pictures, but it doesn’t matter.
They just need someone to describe what’s
in the picture and then they listen.
In any case,
they have to listen to people talking.
They have to learn like that,
and then they’ll have
their written document,
which will be different, and that’s that.
I don’t think you should say that
unless everything is perfectly adapted,
I can’t do it. That’s just not true.
I think you have to do it
because it’s never exactly right anyway.
So you have to get going,
and then you see how it goes.
Line Tracking: Straight to Braille!
Line tracking is an essential skill for learning braille.
Sort your Bricks!
Teachers want to make the most of the time they spend with their students. To get the most out of the LEGO® Braille Bricks, it is important to sort them and have the toolkit ready.
How does braille reading work? First follow the lines.
Braille is read tactilely with the 2 index fingers, supported by the other fingers. The most sensitive part of the finger is the pad, not the tip as you might think.