Handwriting

How to teach a totally blind teenager how to write his name in print. He knows braille, and does quite well at school, but he needs to be able to sign his name for cheques and so on. (or at least knows how to initialise his name)

I decided to use braille. Each letter is a combination of braille. So the first letter of his name is J. P is the first letter of his surname.

J = braille C and reverve V
P = braille L and C and J

I got him to use the blue braille plastic thingy (see picture). He had to use his finger to show me the C brailled letter. That was easy, but when it came to J, he made a mistake. You have to remember that he's used to brailling his letter with the Perkins, not his fingers.

Then I got him to use a crayon to draw his letter. The crayon has to leave a bit of 'residue' in order for my student to feel the letter.

It's not an easy task. It must just be so hard to visualise if you never seen (felt) your name in print. Acutally, that's not quite true. I did write his name using puff paint.
I only started working with him on this skills this past month, so I have no idea what he learned previously.

This part wasn't going to well, so I decided to use Wikki-stix. He needed to shape his letters on his own with the Wikki-stix. I made two letters out of Wikki-stix. One was a reverse J and the other was the correct J. He had to tell me which letter was correct. He then had to re-shape the wrong letter. This worked a treat as he felt that this was a sort of game.

We are still working on it.