Teacher building bridges with Lego Braille blocks

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This article was published 28/08/2023 (842 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LEGO Braille Bricks are a building block toward providing play-based accessible and inclusive tools in schools to support students who are blind or visually impaired.

Each toolkit contains more than 300 Lego Braille Bricks that are moulded to reflect the individual letters, numbers, mathematical symbols and punctuation marks with visual text, three base plates, a brick separator and an activity guide.

“There’s so many ways educators could implement this into their classroom,” said Michael Baker, resource teacher at Springfield Collegiate Institute.

“If there’s one thing we need to do more in schools, it’s to destigmatize people with disabilities.”

During the 2022-23 school year, Baker supported eight students with disabilities and taught a grades 11 and 12 disability-studies course.

He heard about the Lego Braille Bricks through social media and was eligible to receive a free toolkit from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind in partnership with the Lego Foundation.

Using the bricks to teach Braille literacy and numeracy is a beautiful and collaborative display of communication, accessibility and inclusion between blind, visually impaired or sighted classmates and educators, said Baker.

Learning Through Play with Lego Braille Bricks offers 108 activities, such as solving math equations, learning the alphabet and spelling, developing fine motor skills and playing games including bingo, tic-tac-toe and identifying missing letters or numbers in a sequence.

Using the provided lesson plans, Baker was able to design and facilitate activities, engage with students and evaluate their learning and progress in his classroom.

He began teaching the alphabet and numbers and slowly introduced learning the days of the week, months of the year, seasons and simple phrases.

Lego is a familiar toy among children and youth, and it provides such an interesting “hook” for students to play and learn Braille simultaneously within schools, he said.

“Teachers are always interested in new ways of implementing inclusive strategies into their classroom, and why not learn about Braille literacy as an opener, as something to be supported through a larger conversation on disability rights and diversity?” said Baker.

Approximately 1.5 million Canadians identify themselves as blind or visually impaired with 57,000 people living in Manitoba, according to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

“Learning how to spell, read and write is so important in education and so when students with vision loss are not learning Braille, then they’re missing those key components of literacy and understanding text structure,” said Jenna Farmer, CNIB Manitoba program lead for children and youth.

Alternative augmentative communication devices can provide voice choice autonomy and text to speech audio for students with a disability in schools.

However, it’s important for children and youth with vision loss to know how to read Braille, so they are not excluded from a vital part of learning, said Farmer.

Some schools in the province will have Braille or raised text and pictograms beneath room numbers or signs, but there aren’t a lot of students who get to explore the meaning of those dots, said Baker, who is eager to continue using the toolkit this school year.

Few educators seem to know about the LEGO Braille Bricks, and it would make a great tool to be used province-wide if they support a student with a visual impairment, he said.

According to Braille Literacy Canada. There is no federal legislation that provides clear and consistent regulations for the use of accessible signage in Canada.

Although the Canadian Human Rights Act requires that public spaces are accessible and barrier-free, provinces, municipalities, agencies and companies can adopt their own sets of standards.

The LEGO Foundation has partnered with various associations to distribute the Braille literacy toolkit to schools, institutions, education centres, etc., but it is not readily available to consumers.

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca