The RNIB's Pre-Braille Pack

"Feeling Ready to Read"

Peter Lumley & Adrian Farnsworth

The RNIB's new pre-Braille pack, Feeling Ready to Read, was launched at the Second International Conference on Tactile Graphics, held in July 2002 at the University of Hertford.

The pack has been produced to teach a range of pre-reading skills to young children beginning to learn Braille or Moon, and has been designed to allow sighted peers to join in the activities. The comprehensive guide for parents and teachers enables the materials to be used both at home and at school, and suggests many ways in which the activities can be easily extended.

Feeling Ready to Read is based around the theme of Snow White, providing an enjoyable context for the young child to work in.

The pack consists of:

Using these Pre-Braille materials, children experience a range of activities designed to encourage literacy.

It is important to avoid the development of bad reading habits, such as scrubbing, when a child begins to learn Braille, so it is good to use text-free exercises to encourage the development of fluent tracking and discriminatory skills. But the mechanical skills of pre-Braille are only one part of a child's total literacy development. Children also need to learn that books have meaning and are enjoyable.

As a result the activities in the pack have been set in the context of a well known fairy tale so that when a child is practising tracking or discrimination skills they are actively involved in the story of Snow-White. To help facilitate this involvement the pack includes an extended version of the story of Snow White for parents and teachers to read to the children. Because the story of Snow White provides a context for all the activities in the pack it's a good idea to read the whole story to the child first, focusing on the plot, encouraging them to predict what is going to happen next, before beginning to integrate the activities. The story enables the adults to use extra activities to develop the child's understanding of the plot. In order to extend the pack, teachers and parents can buy or make toys and puppets for the child to play with as the story is read or acted out with them. Adults and children can make their own pictures together, using different materials such as bubble-wrap, fur fabric, plastic, metal foil, sand paper, velvet, etc.

Before beginning to read children should have learnt that books have pages which are turned left to right, that books contain text and graphics, that words are read from left to right and top to bottom. Sighted children see adults reading books and through exploring books themselves can learn these concepts incidentally long before they can read words. Children who are learning through touch should not be excluded from these pre-literacy experiences and should develop the same or equivalent concepts about their tactile medium but because blind children do not have access to the same incidental learning opportunities such experiences will need to be deliberately provided.

To help children develop these concepts also included is a simplified tactile story book 'Snow White', and exploring this with an adult, the children will learn that the Braille dots in a book tell a story, and how to handle books and turn pages.

The scheme also introduces children to tactile pictures based on the characters from the 'Snow White' story. Through a series of exercises, using the set of Character and Symbol Cards, they can learn how to recognise Snow White, the Seven Dwarves and symbols for objects in the story, such as a comb and an apple.

Once children are familiar with the story and can recognise the symbols they begin to use the other books. Each book contains a number of fun tactile exercises which have been designed to be used on their own or during subsequent retellings of the story of Snow White.

To begin with, a child can track along different kinds of lines as Snow White makes her journey to the dwarves' house. Because the child is not required to decode anything, these activities help develop the fluency of movement needed to read Braille or Moon efficiently.

Children are also able to practice backtracking while reciting "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of them all?" and by joining in with Sneezy's sneezes they can begin to learn a two handed reading technique.

By helping the dwarves, children will learn to discriminate between different textures in order to, for example, match the texture of Sneezy's hat to his handkerchief, and by spotting when Bashful begins to blush they will be practising using a light fingered touch.

A comprehensive set of notes contain suggestions of phrases to use with each exercise, such as 'Grumpy hates being in a draught. If anyone leaves the door open he shouts, "SHUT THAT DOOR" and a dwarf has to run as fast as he can to lock the door or Grumpy will be in a bad mood all day'.

The different types of activities, grouped together in the books, can be used on their own or whilst reading the story. In some cases the activities in a book have been graded, the later ones being more difficult.

The books not only help the child develop the basic skills they need to read Braille or Moon, they also offer an opportunity to develop many of the skills needed to explore and interpret tactile diagrams, as when Snow White follows the direction of the key to lock the cottage door.

Many of the exercises can be used beyond the pre-reading stage to introduce concepts in tactile representation throughout the child's primary education.

The Scheme has been designed by  Peter Lumley and Adrian Farnsworth, with additional material by Claire Wilson. The manufacture of the swell paper exercises was undertaken by Zychem Limited of Cheshire.