Picture By Number

My daughter has been recreating work she does at school at home.  She learns how to do something at school, and then comes home and wants to make something up for her father or me to do.   She made us a word search in braille the other day.   There was a word bank of words to find and then a grid of letters on a second page for us to locate the words within.   I was suitably impressed with the flawless execution of that particular piece of work but last night she did one even more complicated.   Complicated in that she’s in first grade and blind.   Not that being blind is a mental handicap to her, I think it’s has sort of the opposite effect on her—her mental skills are honed beyond what they would have been had she retained her sight.

Here’s what the sighted students got:

My daughter’s brainiest created a grid of braille numbers on a sheet from 1-100.   On the instruction sheets (it took more than one page because braille takes up space) she wrote the information you see at the bottom of the page. 

Using a crayon of the specified color, you find the braille number and then color over it.   When you do this, it pushes the braille dots back into the paper.   When you’re done you have a picture in very low resolution that is the answer to the question posed at the top of the paper.  

For sighted children there is the additional information of color which help delineate the areas of the drawing.   But my daughter doesn’t seem to mind overly much.   She doesn’t know what things are suppose to look like, so she takes in what information she does have and files it away, only to be refined later when more detailed information comes in.  

This is what she wrote for me as instructions last night:  

Some of the numbers are out of order.   When I came home she was almost done.   She was going back and forth from the instructions to her number grid to figure out which numbers needed to be colored in.   She got every one correct.   When I started to color in the pink I could see a pattern.  

Then I got to the white and told her it was going to be hard to see the white crayon on the paper because it was mostly white.   I don’t think she understood that well.   She told me I could use grey, although the thing in the picture was pink and white.   But grey would be okay too.  

Here’s the final picture.   She stapled the two pieces of paper together to accommodate the larger picture she’d created:

It’s a pink and white rabbit.   We agreed that the two ears were a little too close, but the rest is a decent representation in ultra low resolution of a front-on view of a rabbit.   And how does she even know what a rabbit likes like from that direction?   She really amazes me on a regular basis. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son was going to go to a museum with my parents today but there was a snafu and their car wouldn’t start in the parking lot of the school after they’d picked him up.   He wasn’t that bothered by it and didn’t seem to want to get out of the car when we came to get him because he’d gotten into drawing something on Mimi’s notepad.   He told us they had rescheduled to Friday because it was a day off.   A day off?!  My husband and I got on the phone and checked calendars and didn’t have him off on Friday.   He is though.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I was walking my daughter back to her seat at dinner and was in rather a hurry so I moved her body in the direction I wanted it to go.   She said in a mildly indignant tone, “Mom!  That’s not how you do ’Sighted Guide’”.   Sighted guide is a way a sighted person can guide a visually impaired person around.   It’s a bit like ballroom dancing in that both parties have to know how to work together.   When they do, it’s smooth and seamless.   I apologized and told her she would have to give me a lesson.