Slate and Stylus

Today we will check out our slate and stylus. Now, the slate and stylus gives us a small, portable, inexpensive way to write.

Think of the slate and stylus as our braille writing pencil or pen. It is super for taking notes, jotting down a phone number, and even making a quick grocery list. So let's jump right in and get started.

All right, we will begin by laying our slate on a table. Now, the hinges will be on our left, and the side with the open rectangular holes will be face up, or on top.

Okay, we will simply lift the top frame of the slate, kind of like we're opening a book. And we will open it all the way up so that it is laying completely flat on the table. Yeah, we will notice that our hinges are now in the middle.

And now that our slate is open, we can feel that the bottom frame, or our frame to the right here, has some tiny indentations. And in each corner of our bottom frame, we will also feel four pointed pins. These pins are for holding our paper snug in place.

Okay, we are ready to load our paper. And we will lay our paper over the right side, or bottom frame of our slate. Now we'll line up our paper so that the left edge of our paper is just inside and flush with the hinges on the left. We will also want to make sure that the top edge of our paper is exactly even with the top of our slate. Otherwise, we'll end up with crooked lines and could end up brailling on top of other braille, and we don't want that.

Okay, we are all lined up. So to keep our paper from slipping, we will want to hold it in place with our right hand, and with our left hand, we will reach over and simply close the left side of our slate.

Yeah, once our slate is closed, make sure to press down firmly on it. And we should hear kind of a popping sound. This sound is our slate's corner pins piercing through our paper. All right, you just might want to give the paper a slight tug just to make sure it's snug in place.

Great, our paper is good to go, so let's grab our stylus. Now, you've probably already guessed that our stylus is our writing tool, and it has a little metal point on it.

Okay, we will hold our stylus so that the top, or end away from the metal point, is under the thickest part of our index finger. And we will place it just between our knuckle and our first joint here. Okay, our index finger, thumb, and middle finger should then just naturally curl around to grasp our stylus. All right, when we begin writing, our stylus needs to be held as straight up and down as possible. Great, we're ready to begin writing.

Now, when writing with our slate and stylus, we actually write from right to left, so that when we're finished writing, we can just flip the paper over to read our paper from left to right as we normally would. All right, to begin writing, we will need to use the index finger of our hand that's not holding our stylus. Yeah, this index finger will act as our guide finger to help us keep our stylus in the right place as well as guide us to our next cell opening.

Now, a quick tip for left-handed writers: If we're holding our stylus with our left hand, we may need to reach under or around the top of our stylus hand to help guide us along our way. Okay, so let's do it.

We'll use our index, or guide finger, to find the first cell in the top right corner of our slate. And here it is. So now that we've found it, we can use our stylus hand to easily move the point of our stylus right Into that first cell in the top right.

Okay, how about we quickly check out our cell here, and at the same time, we'll go ahead and write our full braille cell. Okay, we'll start in the top right corner of our cell, and this is our dot 1.

Remember, we need to keep our stylus as upright as possible. Then we'll give it a firm push down to actually make our braille dot. Now, if we do it correctly, we will hear a small thump sound when the stylus pushes through our paper.

And there you go! We have written our dot 1.

Okay, we'll slowly move our stylus down along the right edge of our cell. Notice how our stylus kind of bumps into the middle groove. Yeah, this is dot 2. So we'll give another little press. Great, and we'll bump our stylus down to the bottom right corner, and here is dot 3. So we will just press.

Okay, we have written our dots 1, 2, and 3.

Now we'll move our stylus to the top left corner of our cell. All right, this is our dot 4. So we will just press, and there's our dot 4. Okay, we'll slide our stylus down until we feel it bump into our dot 5 groove, and we'll give another little push. All right, last but not least, we will slide our stylus down to find our dot 6 groove. And we'll finish off our full braille cell with another little push.

You know, it's really pretty cool that these grooves make all the dots of our braille cell. And remember, since we're writing from right to left, the dots on the right side of the cell are dots 1, 2, and 3, and the dots on the left side are dots 4, 5, and 6.

Now, we could just continue making letters across our line, then move all the way back to the right and down to our next line.

And once we've filled up the four lines of our slate, we will need to move our slate down to continue our writing.

Okay, let's check out how to move our slate down. We will open our slate wide again and place our thumbs on our bottom pins. Now, it's important that we keep our thumbs in place while we just work our index fingers under the top edge of our paper and down towards our thumbs. Now, we'll want to keep our thumbs on the bottom holes in our paper. Then we'll just lift our paper and move it away from us and up. Yeah, we'll need to place the holes that were over our bottom pins, right over our top pins. And once our paper is in place, we should be able to feel the top pins with our thumbs. Now, just like before, we will want to hold our paper in place with our right hand so that it doesn't slip out. And we'll just close our slate right back in place. Again, once our slate is closed, we will give it a little press down to make sure our bottom pins are snug and secure. And there you go! We are ready to start writing again.

I tell you…before we know it, we will be jotting down quick notes, creating handy labels, and even saving our favorite recipes.