“Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille,” by Jen Bryant, illustrations by Boris Kulikov
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016, 36 pages, Grades 2-4.
Though people can perceive the world through any of the five senses, the sense of sight is of particular importance. People read books, go shopping, view nature and appreciate beauty through the visual world. Imagine that you are blind and cannot see anything. How would you survive, go to school or find a job? These are very real questions.
Today, we have an array of equipment to help sightless people but what happened to them in the past? How did blind people live 200 years ago? For example, could they learn to read? Jen Bryant answers many of these questions in her beautifully written story of Louis Braille overcoming these daunting challenges. The name of this remarkable book is “Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille.”
In 1809, a baby boy is born in the village of Coupvray, some 20 miles from Paris. The child’s name is Louis Braille. As he grows up, Louis is naturally curious and extremely bright. His father is a leather maker and affectionately looks over his family. Louis’s mother is equally kind and the family has a loving home.
Louis follows his father into the workshop and begins playing with the sharp punches or awls that his dad uses to make holes in the leather. His father tells him to not pick up these tools, but these admonitions go unheeded by the child. One day, Louis picks up an awl and pushes it into a piece of leather. The awl slips and cuts the boy’s eye. No doctoring is helpful. An eye infection begins in the damaged eye and spreads to Louis’s good eye. By the age of 5, Louis recovers from the infection, but is completely blind.
The Braille family rallies around Louis and make every attempt to help him. His natural intelligence allows him to succeed in school, but it is hard to memorize complete books.
A noble woman in the area takes an interest in Louis. She writes to the Royal School of the Blind and helps secure the boy’s acceptance into the institution. There, under trying conditions, Louis works diligently.
One day, he is taken to the library and allowed to read a book with raised letters. While the letters are based on the Latin alphabet, they are so large that there are very few words on the page. This is a fine reading system, but it was created by sighted people for the blind. The letters are so large that the books are heavy, hard to hold, and have limited text. Additionally, the blind students cannot write with this system. What can be done?
Suddenly, the school receives notice of a military code written with raised designs representing sounds. When Louis touches the pages, he quickly translates the sounds into words. Louis gets an idea. Why not make a system with raised dots representing the Latin alphabet? He works with determination and several years later, at the age of 15, the system is complete. What is it?
Is it possible for a sightless 15-year-old French boy to invent an alphabet? Why is it revolutionary and equivalent to the printing press for sightless people? How does Louis use the awl, the tool that robbed him of sight, to open the world of education for millions of blind people? What happens to Louis Braille? To find out, go to the library and check out this outstanding book, “Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille” by Jen Bryant.
This book is uplifting and demonstrates the heroic qualities of Louis Braille. His courageous and indefatigable desire to open the world of education to the blind will touch your heart.
Today, the Braille System is used worldwide and has literally opened a world to sightless people. In 1952, 100 years after his death, the nation of France moved Louis Braille’s body to the Pantheon, in Paris. This is the final resting place of the greatest men and women in French history. I hope you get a chance to read this award-winning book. It is a marvelous story about an educational liberator.
