I just finished some “homework”. It’s not really my homework, but I’ve adopted it as such. I think I started learning braille at the exact right time based on what my daughter knows and is learning in school. The things she’s coming home with are not too complicated while having the right amount of variety to keep me on the edge of my learning.
I finished the Uncontracted Braille class. Think of that as learning the alphabet in braille. It’s like learning the sign language letters. There are only twenty-six symbols to learn and then you can communicate with a deaf person. Only you’d have to spell out every word letter by letter. It’s nor practical, which is why there are signs for whole words.
The Uncontracted Braille course taught me a lot about braille, including the all important alphabet. I learned other things like numbers and punctuation including period, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, semi-colon, parenthesis and quotation marks. It doesn’t sound like too much, but when you’re looking at a page full of dots, it’s easy to get lost.
I was eager to complete the first course so I could move onto the Contracted Braille class and learn all the really interesting word signs and letter groupings necessary to read braille as it would be if I encountered it anywhere else.
But I had to slow down. There’s only so many combinations you can do with six dots and I started getting confused. It’s like studying hard for the quiz next week in your history class, getting an A and then realizing you were so focused on the one battle in the civil war that you’ve gotten confused with all the dates and events you’d learned before.
I’m not in a great hurry though and there’s no time limit on completing the course (although I would like to be fluent in braille because hey, secret code language, right?) But I needed to practice. There was only so much coming from the course materials I could work through and finding braille samples online with only the contractions I’d been introduced to is nigh impossible. There are 180 contractions and I’m only through a fraction of them.
But I found another source of materials. A great source: my daughter’s homework and school work. I’ve mentioned this before, but it keeps being this resource I didn’t imagine I’d need or know I’d have that’s helping to solidify my braille reading.
Tonight I translated three library books my daughter’s braillest sane home for my daughter to read alongside the print versions. The level of braille is right where I am; my daughter knowing about the same number of contractions that I do. That means most of the words were uncontracted.
I got a lot of practice tonight and I’m starting to see the braille and not have to think, “okay, so that’s ’t’ and the next letter is ‘r’ and then there are two ‘e’s’. I just look at it an know the word is ‘tree’. It’s a relief because I had thought I was stuck for a while, too confused by the addition of new symbols and letter combinations.
I’m lucky I decided to learn braille at what turned out to be just the right time with where my daughter is.
The Big Boy Update: My husband told my son tonight he was going to have to earn screen time from now on. My son was upset. He said he wanted to die. We tried to calm him down but I think it’s going to take a bit for him to adjust.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter and I were doing the “guess what number I’m thinking” game where you say ‘higher’ or ‘lower” until the person figures out what number you’re thinking of. My daughter had been guessing for a while at the number I had when she said, “10-4”. I said, “that’s not a number”. She laughed and said, “sorry, I was just doing a police code.”
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