RNIB AND LEGO BRAILLE BRICKS

I enjoyed meeting with the Royal National Institute of Blind People RNIB yesterday where I learned about LEGO Braille Bricks - playful and tactile tools to teach braille to children with vision impairment. The Lego bricks have been adjusted to correspond to the Unified English Braille alphabet.

Each Lego brick has a printed letter or character so that sighted teachers, students and family members can play on equal terms with a child with vision impairment.

More than 26,000 children in the UK live with a vision impairment so these Lego bricks are a vital tool to help these children develop their academic skills related to the general school curriculum and also skills specific to visually impairment.

The Lego Foundation's concept of Learning Through Play includes five concepts - that the children have experiences that are meaningful, joyful, socially interactive, actively engaging and iterative.