Braille Games and Activities: 15 Classroom Ideas

Fifteen activities for practicing braille in class, grouped by the skill they build rather than by age: touch discrimination, recognizing the cell, letters, writing and speed. Almost all of them can be made with egg cartons, card stock, school glue and bottle caps. And none of them asks the rest of the class to wear a blindfold.

They are written to be used on Monday morning. Each one gives the age range, the materials, how it is played, what it trains and whether it works with a mixed group of blind and sighted students at the same time. That last point is rarely mentioned, and it decides whether an activity fits in a regular classroom or only in a one-to-one session.

Key points

• The activities are grouped by skill, not by age. A nine-year-old who is starting braille does the same touch activities as a four-year-old; only the wrapping changes.
• Touch comes before letters. The first four activities on this list use no braille at all, and they are the ones that most shape what comes next.
• Almost everything is classroom material: egg cartons, school glue, card stock, bottle caps, dried beans. The one thing worth having that is not always there is a slate and stylus.
• Speed is trained last, and against yourself. Racing for its own sake does not make a better reader.
• No blindfolds for the class. Research suggests disability simulations are ineffective and sometimes counterproductive. What works is the whole class learning the code for real.

Before you start: four rules for all fifteen

1. The activity must not make the blind student the topic of the lesson. A braille activity is a literacy activity like any other. If it is introduced as "we're going to do something so we understand Sam", Sam stops being a classmate and becomes part of the curriculum. Introduce it for what it is: today we are writing with another alphabet.

2. It should work for students who read with their fingers and students who read with their eyes. That is possible in almost every case, and it is what lets the activity fit into a regular classroom. The trick is nearly always the same: the material is raised and printed or drawn, with a braille alphabet chart printed and on the wall so everyone can check it. The three activities on this list that do not work with a mixed group say so.

3. Short, frequent sessions. Ten or fifteen minutes several times a week beat an hour in one go. Reading by touch is tiring, and a tired finger stops telling dots apart.

4. Homemade raised dots teach the code, not the touch. A dried drop of school glue is much larger than a real braille dot, which sits little more than two millimeters (about 0.09 inches) from the next one. That is fine, because it lets a classroom make its own material, but be clear about what you are training: the dot pattern, not recognition at real size. Real size is trained with real braille, on embossed paper. Do both at once, not one instead of the other.

How to make raised dots with what the classroom has

If the classroom has none of these, the first sensible purchase is a slate and stylus. It is cheap, fits in a pencil case, and it is the only item on the list that produces real-size braille. How it works, and why you write from right to left, is in how to write braille. The person to ask about embossed material is your school's teacher of students with visual impairments (TVI) or the local blindness organization.

Before letters: touch discrimination

These four activities use no braille. They train what a finger needs before it can tell apart two dots two millimeters apart: feeling textures, deciding whether two things are the same, following a line without losing it, and counting by touch. It is the stage most often skipped, and the one most often paid for later.

1. The texture box

Age: 3–7, and older students starting from scratch · Materials: a shoebox and scraps of everything: sandpaper, velvet, corrugated card, foil, felt, sponge, bubble wrap · Trains: touch discrimination

Cut two identical squares of each material and put them all in the box. The task is to pull out the pairs without looking: the student reaches in, takes a square, and finds its match inside. When all the pairs are out, the game is over.

Three steps, in this order: first very different materials (sandpaper and velvet), then similar ones (two grades of sandpaper), and finally the same material in two sizes. The third is the hard one, and it is the one most like reading.

With a mixed group: yes, and it is one of the best. Sighted students play with their eyes closed or with the box covered with a cloth. No blindfolds, and no conversation about "what it is like to be blind". It is a hands game, full stop.

2. Texture bingo

Age: 4–8 · Materials: milk or soda bottle caps, texture scraps stuck on with double-sided tape, and a board with circles (card stock with circles cut out or drawn works) · Trains: touch discrimination and pattern memory

Each student starts with a board full of caps. The teacher pulls a cap out of a bag, describes it or passes it around to be touched, and whoever has the same one on their board removes it. The first to clear the board wins. A small bump glued at the twelve o'clock position on every cap helps keep it the right way round, a detail that matters more than it seems.

It is described this way, with milk caps and a board of circles, in Tactile Bingo on Paths to Literacy, the resource site of Perkins School for the Blind and the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. It is the same mechanic as activity 9, without letters: that is why it comes first.

With a mixed group: yes, without changing anything. It is bingo.

3. Glue paths

Age: 3–7 · Materials: card stock and white glue. Alternatively, glued string or masking tape · Trains: tracking a line and two-hand coordination

Draw paths with the glue bottle on card stock and let them dry overnight. The student follows them with the index finger, left to right, without lifting it. At the end of each path, a reward: a raised sticker, a button, a piece of Velcro.

The progression is what matters. First a straight, thick line. Then thinner lines. Then several parallel lines, to practice jumping from one to the next without getting lost, which is exactly the movement of going to a new line of text. Then curves, crossings and forks. And finally, two lines at once, one for each hand.

That last step is not decoration. Efficient braille reading uses both hands: both start the line, the left reads the first half while the right finishes it, and as the right hand ends, the left has already dropped down to find the next line. Training it early pays off.

With a mixed group: yes. With eyes closed, a sighted student finds these paths just as hard, which is reason enough to be interested.

4. How many?

Age: 4–8 · Materials: card stock cards with one to six dots of dried glue, half pearls or glued beans · Trains: counting by touch and scanning for dots

Cards with dots in no particular order. The student touches one and says how many there are, without looking and, after the first few times, without counting one by one. The medium-term goal is to recognize "three" at once, the way a sighted person recognizes three dots on a die without counting.

Once that works, change the game: the dots stop being random and are placed in two columns of three. Now the question is not how many there are, but which ones. And you are in the braille cell without having said the word "letter" once.

With a mixed group: yes. It is literally a dice game played with the hands.

Recognizing the six-dot cell

All of braille fits in a rectangle of two columns by three rows, with dots numbered 1, 2 and 3 down the left column and 4, 5 and 6 down the right. Learning that numbering is the step that separates memorizing sixty-odd pictures from understanding a system. These three activities work only on that.

5. The egg carton cell

Age: 4–10 · Materials: six-cup egg cartons, or twelve-cup ones cut in half, and ping-pong, golf or plastic balls · Trains: cell recognition and pattern memory

A six-cup egg carton standing upright is a giant braille cell. Call out a letter, and the student places balls in the cups that make it. Or the other way round: someone places the balls and the others guess the letter.

It is the most reused activity on this list, and it is not ours: Paths to Literacy explains that you only need to cut a dozen-egg carton in half to get two complete cells, and use them with golf or ping-pong balls. Several cartons in a row spell whole words.

Watch one detail: in an upright carton of two columns by three, dot 1 is the top left. Mark it, with a sticker or a notch, so the carton always sits the same way. A carton turned around teaches the wrong letters.

With a mixed group: yes, and it is the star activity for that. Everyone in the class can have their own carton.

6. Cells all around the room

Age: any · Materials: none. You find them · Trains: cell recognition

A scavenger hunt: find objects at school and at home that are, underneath, a six-dot cell. Egg cartons, ice cube trays, muffin tins, chocolate boxes, screw trays, paint palettes. Whatever turns up comes to class, gets checked for two columns of three and, if it has them, becomes classroom material.

We did not invent it: Paths to Literacy recommends pointing out the braille cell to a child whenever it appears in everyday life, and mentions muffin tins, egg cartons and the knobs of a dresser arranged in two columns of three. The reason it gives is the one that matters: a sighted child sees letters everywhere, big and in fun places, and a blind child deserves the same chance. It takes five minutes, happens once, and fills the classroom with free material.

With a mixed group: yes. In fact, it works better the more people search.

7. The giant floor cell

Age: 5–10 · Materials: six hoops, six cushions, six chairs or six squares of tape on the floor · Trains: cell recognition, with the whole body

The egg carton idea at classroom scale: mark six positions on the floor in two columns of three. The teacher calls out a letter and the students stand on the dots that make it. With a whole class, you can set up two or three cells at once and spell short three-letter words, one group per letter.

It works because it forces the group to decide out loud which dots each letter has, and that is where the learning happens. And it works because they move, which, in an elementary classroom at the end of the day, is no small thing.

This one is teaching judgment rather than a published source: it is the egg carton moved to the floor. We include it because it best solves the problem of twenty-five students doing something at once with no materials.

With a mixed group: yes. Let the blind student walk the six positions before starting, and keep them fixed for the whole session.

Letter games

From here on, there is real braille on the material. If the school has an embosser, now is the time to order a batch of cards. If not, make them with a slate and stylus, or with glue dots, knowing that then they are large cells, good for learning the code but not for training the fingertip.

A word on which letters to use: do not introduce all twenty-six at once. Start with a small group of letters that are easy to tell apart and add more over time. The full chart is on the braille alphabet page, and the logic of the letter series is explained in how to learn braille.

8. Memory pairs

Age: 5 and up · Materials: 16 to 24 card stock cards, two of each letter, with the letter in raised braille and also printed in a corner · Trains: pattern memory and discrimination

The classic memory game, with the cards face up instead of face down: touch them, find the two that match, keep the pair and go again. In a mixed group, sighted students play with their eyes closed or with the cards inside a cloth bag; otherwise they always win and the game dies.

The most useful variation is a braille letter and the same letter in print: matching the two systems instead of two identical cells. The blind student searches by touch, the sighted student by sight, and each needs the other to complete the pair.

The same deck makes two more games: dominoes, chaining tiles whose halves match, and card games, where you win tricks by reading your card aloud.

With a mixed group: yes, with the braille-and-print version.

9. Braille bingo

Age: 6 and up · Materials: bingo cards with a grid of braille letters, and counters to cover them. Without cards: an embossed sheet for each student and dried beans as markers · Trains: quick recognition and targeted search

The teacher calls a letter, a sign or a short word, and each student finds it on their card and covers it. Line and bingo, as usual. At the end, whoever calls bingo rereads aloud the squares they covered: that is where you find out whether they read or guessed, and it is the part not to skip.

It is described by Grace Gundel in Braille Bingo on Paths to Literacy, with card stock, braille labels and Velcro so the counters stick and do not move. The Velcro is optional; counters that stay put are not. If the material shifts mid-game, the blind student loses the whole card.

With a mixed group: yes. The sighted students' cards carry the same cells printed in ink.

10. Guess the letter from its dots

Age: 6 and up · Materials: none · Trains: memory of the code

An oral game with nothing at all. Someone says some numbers, "one, two, four", and the others say which letter it is. Or the reverse: say a letter and the others call out its dots. It works in line, in the five minutes before recess or while tidying up.

Two variations that work: I spy with dots ("I'm thinking of a letter with dot 1 and dot 5, and nothing else": that is e, ⠑) and the chain (each student says a letter that shares at least one dot with the previous one).

It is the only activity on this list that costs absolutely nothing and can be done without notice. That is why it ends up being used most. It has no source: it is teaching judgment, resting on the fact that the cell is numbered, which is the basis of the whole system.

With a mixed group: yes, and it is the fairest of all: nobody has an advantage from seeing.

Writing

Reading and writing support each other. A student who only reads braille recognizes cells; one who also writes understands how they are built. And writing is what turns braille into something for talking to someone, which is what the last activity in this group is about.

11. Dot dictation

Age: 5 and up · Materials: a Perkins brailler, a slate and stylus, or just egg cartons and balls · Trains: writing and the link between dots and letters

The teacher dictates dots, not letters: "one, three, five". The student writes or places them, and then says what came out. It is the most direct exercise there is for fixing the cell numbering, and it works at three levels depending on the classroom's material: balls in an egg carton, a stylus on card stock, or a braillewriter if the school has one.

Then reverse it: dictate the letter, and the student has to call out the dots before writing it. Finally, dictate short words.

If you use a slate and stylus, warn first that you write from right to left, because the dots are read on the other side of the paper. It is not an obstacle, it is part of the exercise, but finding out halfway through a dictation discourages anyone.

With a mixed group: yes, if there is material for everyone. If there is only one slate, the others use egg cartons or draw the cell in their notebook.

12. The object box dictation

Age: 5–10 · Materials: a box of small objects, and something to write with · Trains: writing and vocabulary

The teacher fills a box with objects. Each student takes one out and names it aloud, everyone touches it, and everyone writes its name. Repeat until the box is empty. It works best if the box has a theme: the kitchen box, the garden box, the box of things that make a sound.

This one is not ours: it is described exactly this way, under this name, in the teaching guidelines of the Ibero-American Braille Council (2022, in Spanish), alongside a group dictation in which the teacher starts a sentence and each student continues it.

It has an advantage worksheets do not: the blind student writes the name of something they have just held. In a classroom where much of the vocabulary reaches them only by ear, that is worth a lot.

With a mixed group: yes, and it is one of the easiest to fit into a regular language arts class.

13. The class mailbox

Age: 7 and up · Materials: a cardboard box with a slot, cards and something to write with. A braille alphabet chart on the wall · Trains: functional writing, and everything else along the way

A box in a corner of the classroom. Anyone can leave a note for anyone, on one condition: the note is in braille. Notes are delivered on Fridays.

What makes this work is not the mechanics but the imbalance it breaks. The blind student reads notes with their fingers. Their sighted classmates read the ones written to them with their eyes, checking the chart on the wall when they get stuck, so nobody needs to read by touch for the mailbox to work from day one. Writing, they do have to learn, and that is the practice.

To write, in order of preference: a slate and stylus if there are any; if not, pressing the dots into the back of the card with a stylus or a dried-out pen on a mouse pad, from right to left, like a slate; and if that is too much, glue drops on the front, writing normally from left to right and waiting for them to dry.

This is the argument behind everything else, not just one more activity: as long as only one person in the room knows braille, it remains one person's private language.

With a mixed group: it makes no sense any other way.

Speed and fluency

These two come last for a reason worth stating first: speed is trained late. Pushing the speed of a student who does not yet recognize cells with confidence produces the opposite of what you want. The finger scrubs, backtracks and guesses, and those habits are hard to undo.

Reading speed does not mean reading fast; it means reading with understanding. It is the head that reads, not the hands.

A second warning, about races. Reading by touch is slower than reading by sight for years, and comparing a blind student with a sighted classmate does not measure progress: it measures something else.

14. Find every m

Age: 7 and up, and only once the letters are known · Materials: an embossed sheet with rows of loose letters, or a short text in braille · Trains: recognition speed and targeted search

Give the student a sheet with rows of characters and ask them to find and mark every instance of one letter. Time it if the student likes that, and do not if it stresses them. Then raise the level: look for two letters at once, or for a letter inside a meaningful text.

With a mixed group: yes, with the same sheet printed in ink for everyone else. Here sighted students are much faster, so each student should compete with themselves, not with each other.

15. The race against yourself

Age: 8 and up · Materials: a short text in braille and a timer · Trains: fluency

The same text, three times over a week, noting how long it takes. The opponent is the previous time, not the classmate next door. After each reading, two or three questions about the content: if the time drops but the answers get worse, the student is not reading faster, just scrubbing faster.

With a mixed group: no, not as it is. A sighted student reading braille by touch will be ten times slower, and one reading the same text in print will be ten times faster. Either way, the comparison means nothing. This is one of the three activities done individually or in a one-to-one session.

Summary table of all fifteen

What not to do

Blindfold the class. It is the first activity any search turns up and the one you should do least. A 2007 meta-analysis of forty-one studies on disability simulations concluded that the data do not support them as an effective practice for changing attitudes. Two experiments published in 2015 by Silverman, Gwinn and Van Boven found something worse: people who did a blindness simulation afterwards judged blind people as less capable of working and living independently.

The distinction that matters: closing your eyes so a hands game is fair is training. It has a concrete goal and leads to no conclusions about anyone. Wearing a blindfold for twenty minutes "to understand what it is like" does lead to conclusions, and they are bad ones. If sighted students close their eyes in any activity on this list, it should always be for the first reason, and nobody should leave with opinions about their classmate's life.

Turn the blind student into teaching material. "Show us how you read", "show us your cane", "tell us how you find your way". Once, if they want to and have decided beforehand, fine. As a recurring resource, no: they stop being a student and become an exhibit.

Push speed early. Already said above, but it is the most common of the three mistakes. A student rushed too soon develops habits (scrubbing, backtracking, guessing from context) that later have to be undone one by one.

Correct every mistake while they read. Interrupting at every slip breaks the continuous movement of the finger, which is exactly what needs to become automatic. Note the mistakes and work on them afterwards.

Run the activity only for the blind student. If you only do the activities that happen in the one-to-one session, braille stays one person's private language.

What we could not confirm

• The measured effectiveness of each activity. We found no controlled trials comparing these activities with each other or with doing nothing. What exists is teaching documentation, from Paths to Literacy and from braille councils, plus published classroom practice. That is a reasonable basis; it is not experimental evidence, and we do not present it as such.
• The ages. The ranges on this page are guidelines. No study sets the best age for each game, and a student who starts braille late does the early activities whatever their age.
• Whether homemade raised dots transfer to real-size braille. It is the most important question in this article, and we found no research that answers it. Our recommendation, large material for the code and real braille for touch, at the same time, rests on practice described in the literature, not on a comparative study.
• Who first proposed the egg carton as a cell. It circulates on dozens of sites without credit. Paths to Literacy documents it and is the reference we give, but we could not trace its origin.

Your first week, in order

1. Monday: put up the alphabet. Print the braille alphabet chart and hang it where everyone can see it. Without it, half of these activities do not work with the whole group.
2. Monday: play activity 10, guessing the letter from its dots. It needs nothing and tells you in five minutes where the class stands.
3. Tuesday: send the egg carton hunt home (activity 6). By Wednesday you will have material for the rest of the term.
4. Wednesday: let the glue paths dry (activity 3) for Friday.
5. During the week: ask for real braille. A batch of embossed cards from the TVI or the school team. It is the only thing that takes time, so ask for it first.
6. Find out whether the school has a slate and stylus. If not, it is the one purchase worth making.
7. Friday: set up the mailbox (activity 13). It is the activity that holds all the others together through the year.
8. And learn the alphabet yourself. By sight, in short sessions, it takes a week or two: step by step in how to learn braille.

Frequently asked questions

Can these activities be done without real braille materials?

At three levels. The first seven and number 10 use no braille at all: egg cartons, card stock, glue, caps and classroom objects. Numbers 8, 9, 11, 12 and 13 work with homemade raised dots, knowing that they then train the code and not the fingertip. Numbers 14 and 15 need real-size braille, with no substitute: that is exactly what they train. And no sheet from a regular printer can be read by touch, however sharp it looks.

Which activity should I do on day one if I have nothing?

Number 10, guessing the letter from its dots. It needs no material, is played standing up, takes five minutes and works for the whole class at once. After that, number 6: send students to look for objects at home with two columns of three cups.

Do these activities work for a student with some usable vision?

Yes, and do not assume braille is unnecessary for them. Reading heavily magnified print is often slow and tiring, and the fatigue shows up with the long texts of later grades. Many students use both, and that decision is made with a formal learning media assessment.

Can a teacher who does not know braille lead these activities?

The touch activities, starting today. The letter activities need you to recognize the cells by sight, which you can learn in a week or two of short sessions and has nothing to do with reading by touch. With the chart on the wall, you can start before you know it.

What if the blind student does not want the whole class doing braille?

It happens, especially from about eleven or twelve, and it is almost always about not wanting to stand out. Talk about it in private, offer options instead of imposing a solution, and make sure the activity does not revolve around them: the mailbox works because notes go from anyone to anyone, not because there is a required recipient.

Do these activities teach grade 2 braille?

They work with either. In English-speaking countries, children usually learn contracted (grade 2) braille, often from the start, and every letter game above works just as well with contractions: put wordsigns such as and (⠯), for (⠿), the (⠮) and with (⠾) on the bingo cards and memory pairs. One detail to watch: in grade 2 a letter standing alone is a word (m on its own means more), so a single letter on a card is written with the grade 1 indicator in front, ⠰⠍. The full list is in braille contractions.