One of my students is struggling with the tracking a line of braille and staying on that line. She is a third grade student in a life skills setting. We just started braille lessons at the end of February, so she has only been working on this for about six weeks. We’re finding that old habits die hard, and she is used to using her left hand to hold the paper in place, while using her right hand to color. She is beginning to use both hands together to track a line of braille, however her ability to stay on one line and not jump around on the page is an issue.
In an effort to teach this student to track a line of braille, I am using two activities from the book “Braille Literacy: A Functional Approach” by Diane Wormsley. I have modified the one page activity into a book format, with each page being one line only.
The activity book of “Karen” is one where we “look” for Karen as I “lost” her.
With the frog book we look to see how far the frog has “jumped” from his log.
Once she becomes more fluent with tracking one line of braille, I will make her books with two lines of braille and so on, until she can do a full page of braille. Since she has been enjoying the braille activities we’ve done thus far, I see her moving through these activities quickly.
