American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Fall 2019 TEACHING
The Braille Monster: A New Take on Flashcards for Blind Kids
by A PDRIB Post Contributor
Reprinted from www.pdrib.com
From the Editor: The Professional Development and Rehabilitation Institute on Blindness (PDRIB) at Louisiana Tech University offers exciting programs that train O&M instructors and teachers of blind students. A trove of excellent posts about teaching strategies can be found on the PDRIB website. This article and the piece that follows are good examples.
A project for the Teaching Strategies class that I'm taking this quarter as part of the teacher of blind students master's program is to come up with a lesson plan to teach literacy skills. Not only do we develop the plan, but we then teach a blind child in town using that lesson. I worked with an outgoing preschool student who was ready to practice the Braille code in a fun way.
I knew the student went to Braille Club, a group that meets at the Louisiana Center for the Blind and offers additional practice for interested Braille students of all ages. I asked her teacher what she was working on there. The teacher told me that she was learning Dot 5 words and that she enjoyed using flashcards. I wanted to do something more interesting than just flashcards and drilling words. I like to do crafts, so I came up with the "Braille Monster."
I typed up Braille flashcards of all the Dot 5 words and clipped the upper right-hand corners so that my student could tell quickly whether she was holding the card upright. I wrote a short, one-page story for her to read in Braille with lots of Dot 5 words in it. I made up silly things in the story such as, "My name [Dot 5 n] is Passion, and I have a mother [Dot 5 m],” so that she could practice reading them.
Now, about the monster. I took a cereal box and covered it with felt. The monster has a colorful boa for hair, big googly eyes, and a cut-out mouth—to eat all the Dot 5 words, of course!
I mixed the Dot 5 flashcards with other flashcards containing Braille words. Every time she found a Dot 5 word, my student got to feed it to the Braille Monster, and she loved that! She did a great job finding the Dot 5 words and stayed attentive, which was awesome because she tends to get off track during lessons.
I will be making more Braille Monsters for the Louisiana NFB BELL Academy this summer. The BELL Academy in Louisiana hosts a Braille Carnival with lots of games to make learning Braille fun and engaging.
You can get creative when you think of lessons for your students. The Braille Monster was easy to put together, and it could readily be adapted for sighted children to use with print flashcards as well. You don't have to over-think things or put a lot of money into projects; you can use materials that are already around the house to make your own monster lessons!
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