Zero to Braille

My daughter lost her sight shortly before turning four-years old.   She’s now almost six-and-a-half, meaning she’s been close to a third of her life with very little vision at all.   But she remembers vision and for those first four years she saw letters and words all around her.   She wasn’t reading yet, but she was practicing drawing cursive letters in her Montessori class and she was inundated with non-verbal communication that only the readers of the world could decipher, because we could both read and see.

And then she had a dramatic loss of vision.   She can’t see anything precise at distance other than moving around obstacles.   She also can’t see up close, but that doesn’t stop her from trying.   Instead of the beautiful, cursive version of her name she had learned before she lost her sight, she now does a fairly nice print version—on everything (she is fond of her name).   It wasn’t until two-thirds the way through her life that she was impacted visually and couldn’t learn how to read.   It wasn’t until later still when we got engaged with the public school system and they insisted she needed to do, “pre-braille work” (whatever that was, we thought at the time).   

But they were right.   She needed to learn to use her fingers.   She needed to be excited about reading and learning about things from a book and not from asking an adult to help you.   The good news is she’s getting it.   She’s getting it so fast we can’t keep up.    

At the beginning of the year she wasn’t that interested in reading braille.   She’s in kindergarten.   I don’t think I was reading in kindergarten, but now, a little over half-way through the school year, this is what she’s reading:  

She’s reading all the words and knows about all the punctuation.   She’s sounding out long words and knows about silent letters.   She knows the “contracted” braille versions of words (check out ‘like’ and the second ‘you’ in the second image.    And she’s flying through books.    She can sound out words I wouldn’t expect her to even get close to—but she’s getting them almost right.  

I am really impressed both with her as well as her teachers and the reading curriculum that’s been developed to help understand the mess we call the English Language.    

The Big Boy Update:   My son was getting clever with his name the other day, integrating it with a phrase they use in his school to describe part of the Montessori curriculum: ‘Grace and Courtesy”.    He told me, “you need some more Greyson and Courtesy.   Also, I want some more in the blog.   And ten exclamation points.”  I told him I’d write him up with his words the way he told me to say them.  So there you go. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There is a game called BopIt.   It’s a little device that talks to you.   There are three things you do to this device:  pull it (pull a handle), twist it (twist a knob) and bop it (hit a button).   While we were on our ski vacation my daughter told us, “we should have brought BopIt…I’ll be BopIt.”   And she did just that.   She said one foot was the pull it part, one hand was the twist it spot and you could bop her head.   When it was time to start the game she would call out what to do next and tell you if you got one wrong.    Honestly, it was pretty fun to play with her being the ‘BopIt’ machine.