[blindkid] slate and stylus

Joy Orton ortonsmom at gmail.com
Tue May 17 00:24:38 UTC 2011


Hi Penny and other parents,
I just wanted to stick in my two cents on the "writing backwards" or
"writing in the opposite direction" idea with slate and stylus.

My four year old is sighted, and she is learning to write. She knows
how to write her name, which is nine letters long, except the z, which
she writes backwards. Last week she was writing her name on a craft
she had made, and she started on the  upper right of the paper. She
proceeded to write every letter from the right instead of from the
left. It is completely legible in the mirror! I just watched,
fascinated. I asked her what she was doing, and she said she wanted it
to fit into the space.

Maybe this is just irrelevant, but I thought it was interesting how
her brain and hand just automatically flipped those letters.
Joy
>
>
> On 5/14/11, Aaron Cannon <cannona at fireantproductions.com> wrote:
>> Hi Penny.
>>
>> My first response to your idea of teaching your daughter the slate and
>> stylus is, please do!  I had a pretty good education in braille and
>> O&M, but if I could change one thing about my instruction, it would be
>> how much work we did on the slate & stylus.  Maybe sacrifice some of
>> those endless hours spent learning the Opticon (it probably seemed
>> like a good idea at the time).
>>
>> Don't worry too much about confusing your daughter with the slate.
>> However, it can't hurt to be a little careful in how you talk about
>> the slate & stylus.  Get her to think about writing on the slate as
>> just going the other way.  She's not writing backwards letters, she's
>> writing the same braille letters she's used to.  She's just writing
>> them going the other direction.
>>
>> I know it's just semantics, but sometimes it can help.
>>
>>




More information about the BlindKid mailing list