Hello, everyone. Today, I would like to share with you a little about my experience of teaching Braille for a college class. I know Braille well, and so mastery of the topic was no problem for me. Also, I knew what activities I wanted to do. However, two questions bombarded my thought up to the day of the lesson.
1. How could I fit everything into the fifteen-minute time allotment provided for the lesson.
2. How could I observe whether or not the students were actually correct in forming the appropriate letter of the alphabet?
The first question was answered during the lesson, but to prepare, I simply knew I would have to summarize some of the activities. My first activity was a preassessment to see if the students knew who invented Braille, what Braille was if they were presented with it, and any information about the Braille cell and how letters were formed. Because I am going into teaching, I chose second-grade standards to match to this lesson, and I decided that the group could magically switch from second grade to college age because I wanted future teachers to be introduced to and hopefully encouraged to learn Braile. I chose to skip the introduction portion of this activity and only focus on finding out what the college students knew. Fortunately, their prior knowledge did not include the inventor of Braille, and so I was able to teach them new information. The other main activity that I wanted to do, but that I did not have time for, was to have them manipulate egg cartons with small balls to represent dots, but I knew there would not be time, and so I had to forego this activity. However, I did make a poster, using six foam circles to represent dots. I had velcroed them to the board so that I could use them as a model for showing the students how to form Braille. On the backside of the poster, I had a large rectangle with numbers in the appropriate places and each number in its own little box. I wanted to emphasize that even if a Braille cell only had one dot touchable, it still consisted of the space for the missing dots. This activity worked well, and because they were college students, they all quickly learned a, b, and c. I was thankful for this because the time was almost up, and I needed to do my summing up of the lesson. I had another activity planned, and so I explained it to them and closed by handing out a printout, which contained graphical representations of the entire alphabet for their own further study. The students, however, were so excited about learning Braille and disappointed that I could not do the activity that the instructor decided to allow me to go through with it after all. I had previously placed four Braille cells on the floor. A pink cell was all by itself, and the other three cells, all in different colors, were beside each other. The object was for the students, in small groups, to perform a movement activity, such as walking, jumping, hopping, etc., that I called out from the pink cell to the other cells. AT the end, I called out c a t, and three groups now formed the word cat.
I am really elaborating on this in case any of you might be interested in teaching and realizing that part of the program in education is actually creating and teaching minilessons to your classmates. I chose Braille as my lesson, but for the next one, I will choose a different topic.
Now, let us focus on my real concern—how would I know that the students were standing correctly on the pink cell and then once again on the other cells? I actually answered this question during the teach since I am often spontaneous. The answer was simpler than the million I had imagined up to that point. All I had to do was to ask questions as I would do if I were asking directions somewhere when traveling.
Therefore, I asked questions like: “Where are you standing? On the back two circles? On a back circle and a middle circle? Is one of you on the back circle on the left and the other on the front circle on the left. Notice that b is only formed if you are on the back and middle circles on the left. If you were drawing the letter b, would you draw a vertical or horizontal line? A c? How many people are standing on the cell? Why might I be asking this other than the fact that I am blind and unable to see you? “ The answer to this final question was because placement of a dot within a cell is important as is the number of dots. Just so you understand some of my above questions, dot 1 was on the back left, and if you imagine a Braille page, dot 1 is closer to the top of the page than it is to your tummy, and so these dots on the floor were placed so that if a student stood at one end, the other end was against a wall, or the back. The wall was the back because the reader would be facing the wall when looking at the cell, and so the bottom dot was actually closer to their feet since there tummy is way up in the air as I was standing instead of sitting for this activity. Also, when asking questions, I had students say their name, followed by my repeating their name, followed by the appropriate individual answering the question. By the answers I received, I was able to successfully determine where the students were and if the concept of forming Braille letters had been mastered for them.
Are you a college student or someone who has taught someone else for whatever reason? Or, have you needed to be specific in learning directions to a location? Feel free to share your experiences with all of us here on the Blindness Blog, and thank you all for reading and participating. I do enjoy all of your comments.
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