Feeling the Fossils

I've said many times how fortunate we are to have such dedicated and kind teachers for my daughter.  We love my daughter's prior braillest, Mrs. Aagaard, who retired after my daughter's kindergarten year.  We see her regularly as we meet up at festivals.   After she retired, my daughter had a new braillest assigned and I won't lie, we got exactly who we hoped we would get.   A child's braillest stays with them across grades and in this case, my daughter will have Ms. B until she goes to middle school.   Which is wonderful, because we all love Ms. B.

I've put pictures up before of the work Ms. B.  does to provide my daughter with "consumable" versions of all the work her sighted classmates are doing.   My daughter doesn't have any trouble at all completing work as long as she can understand what the work is.   Photocopied sheets don't work for her.   For example, here's some work the students did earlier this month.  They were given five pictures of fossils and told to sort them into three categories: fossils preserved in sap, fossils preserved in tar, and body fossils.  Their sheet of fossils to sort looked like this:

The students cut out the pictures and put them on a second sheet, sorted by type.  Ms. B. prepared the five fossils for my daughter each on a small piece of braille paper.   My daughter felt each one and then pasted them down on the appropriate sheet.   Here's my daughter's completed work after she's done the sorting.   But that's not the important bit here.  Look at what Ms. B. did to make a tactile version of each fossil pictured above.

I know, amazing, right?  I use the word, "humbled" a lot when I talk about what our teachers do to help my daughter.   It's the best word though; I am truly humbled by what Ms. B. and the other teachers do to give my daughter the same education her sighted peers have.  We're so glad we have Ms. B. as my daughter's braillest.   I know she reads this blog, so here's a huge thank you from our family and friends for all you do.  We are all so very grateful.

What I can Read Now:  I did it!  I achieved reading a piece of braille that I've been wanting to understand for several years.  I couldn't do so until now because it's fully contracted and I couldn't read all the contractions so historically I'd give up or compare it to the printed words to figure it out.  I'll paste it here and you can see if you can guess what it is.   It's something I've seen in many different buildings and it's almost guaranteed to be in most large commercial buildings.

If you guessed the baby changing station instructions in the handicapped stall of public bathrooms, you get three points.  

What My Son Has To Do:  My son has to read a rather large book over the break.   There are zero pictures.   We're setting aside time every day for him to read and rewarding him with additional screen time to match any reading he does over the allotted fifteen minutes.   I mentioned the reading this morning and he wailed and put his hands over his ears.   He loves reading when he's interested.   He's out of school on a long break though and I don't think any books are interesting to him right now.

What My Daughter Can Draw:  My daughter's ability to draw has declined since she first lost her vision.  I remember her drawing the print letters, again and again, two years or so ago, trying to get the shape of them correct, even though she couldn't see where she'd started the letter and would get off track by the end of the character.  On paper she would put her fingers right at the tip of the sharpie (which we used because she could see them more easily) and get ink all over her hand and face.   She stopped trying to draw for a long while though.   But she's started up again recently and is getting better and better even though she can't see what she's drawing at all.   Here's Olaf she drew the other day.