[AERNet] Deciphering Braille

[Ayala Ballonoff]

Hi. I'm looking for some feedback.

I have a student who has been instructed in Braille & exposed to Braille since early  intervention.  At 10 years of age the student is reading  48 point print, and print on CCTV at a rate of 2 words correct per minute.

Notes from previous teachers indicated she was reading Braille passages  with much greater fluency than that.  (Forensic examination of the Patterns books reveals that some  passages were read multiple times over a 2 week period, perhaps allowing for memorization of the passage)

She always requires a high level of prompting  & cueing to read new passages, and even on the most familiar words she examines them for over a minute with out saying anything if not prompted.

She seems to have great difficulty discerning the letters.

Today after we Brailled a  morning statement, "Today is Monday, March 19, 2007." Now, she does remember all the letter formations a-z, and remembers where braille contractions go in the words.  

Dot-5 words were introduced in February, though she has been seeing days of the week on the calendar all year (and hopefully before that).

She had a lot of difficulty with the spelling of Monday (the o-n part) so I made a vertical list of the words "Today, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc."

I had her look at each word, and asked her to find what was the same in each.  No dice.

I asked her to look at the end of each word and read the letter at the end of each word. She read the "D" in each word variously as s, l, j, & d.

I asked her to look at the last 2 letters in the first word & the second word.  She has trouble expressing her self, so I  will sometimes give her 3 choices of a response.  After looking at the last 2 letters in the first & second words I said "OK ,  are they  1) the same , 2) different, 3)I have no idea what I'm  reading."

My student chose "I have no idea what I'm reading" & seemed relieved to say it.

An other factor to add to the mix, a recent evaluation shows that she has close to grade level comprehension of auditory materials.

She  brailles much better than she writes, and keyboarding was introduced this year.  She has good kinesthetic memory & already knows 2 function keys & some familiarity with the QWERTY keyboard. 

My question--to what extent should I spend time on reading Braille?  

Looking forward to thoughts from the group.

Ayala
   

 


Ayala Ballonoff, MS Ed-CTVI
Teacher of Blind/VI
Wallingford-Swarthmore School District
aballonoff at wssd.org
 
---------------------------------
TV dinner still cooling?
Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aerbvi.org/pipermail/aernet_lists.aerbvi.org/attachments/20070319/094c5048/attachment.html