About: Literacy in Your Classroom
Regardless of what grade level and subject you teach, as a teacher, you will be concerned about how your braille-reading student has access to information (typically printed) that you will use in your class. This website is designed to address the needs of classroom teachers working with braille-reading students, and so, obviously, the use of braille will be of paramount importance. But the braille-reading student in your class will also be using a variety of other literacy tools and it will be important for you to recognize and understand how those tools can be used most effectively.
You will probably want to know more about the braille code and it would be most helpful for you to learn how to read and produce the alphabet and numbers in braille so that you can support the student and write brief feedback notes to him or her.
The following are important points to remember as you work with a braille-reading student in your class:
- Braille equals print. Everything that can be represented in print can be represented in braille.
- Students who read braille should have the same classroom materials at the same time as their print-reading peers. The teacher of students with visual impairments can help set up a routine for making sure that this happens.
- Students with visual impairments effectively use a wide variety of literacy tools to accomplish daily, educational and vocational tasks including reading text, using taped or digital recordings, live readers and other tools.
This section will help you understand braille and how a student who uses braille will learn braille as a part of reading and writing instruction or as a unique code.