The BELL Academy Comes to Your Home

For the last dozen years, the Federation has come to associate summer with teaching Braille to blind children through our Braille Enrichment through Literacy and Learning Academy (BELL). The key to BELL has been providing hands-on instruction, often one on one, for a two-week program. COVID-19 threatened this program and tradition, but when challenged, Federationists found creativity where others might have found crisis. We figured out how to teach Braille through classes made possible by the Internet and the connections it enabled.

Like we normally do in person, the staff combined teaching and play, and several times each week were conferences between participants and the BELL teachers in their states. The work and the fun concluded with what we called a BELLebration on the evening of August 20, and everyone is looking forward to next year when we hope to all be together again.