Published: April 08, 2009 09:05 am      

Brandon’s Braille

McHenry boy speaks during Washington coin unveiling

MCHENRY — Seven-year-old Brandon Pickrel was one of three children to speak at the unveiling of the Louis Braille 200th birthday commemorative silver dollar coin.

“It was a very prideful moment for us,” Trudy Pickrel, Brandon’s mother, said of the event held at the U.S. Mint in Washington. “He worked very hard on (the speech.) It was a proclamation that he and two other children read. To have a first-grader reading, there were people who were just very proud of how he’d done reading Braille.”

Brandon, a McHenry resident and first-grader at Accident Elementary, has been learning to read Braille since he was 2 years old, Trudy said, but he is still learning what is called contracted Braille. Contracted Braille, rather than spelling out individual letters, has a specific symbol for a word. Brandon has knowledge of phonics and first-grade Braille.

“I don’t like to read, but my favorite book is ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ but I can’t read it myself,” Brandon said. “That’s because the big books are hard.”

His favorite book, like many others, is printed in contracted Braille, his mother said, but he is continuing to learn, which was especially important for the proclamation he read when the National Federation for the Blind unveiled the commemorative coin.

Brandon said he was just a little nervous when he went up to speak, but that he was very excited before and had even bounced on the hotel beds. Both his parents and his two younger sisters attended the unveiling ceremony with him.

Part of Brandon’s speech, Trudy said, was to express concern that only about 10 percent of blind children in America are being taught Braille. She added that 90 percent of employed blind people use Braille and that $10 from the sale of each coin will go toward Braille Literacy in America.

Brandon was the youngest of the three who spoke, and many people in attendance reportedly were impressed with the larger words he had to read from the proclamation.

Children who are neither fully blind nor fully sighted are made to rely on the little sight they have, Trudy said, and that was part of the reason she has advocated bringing a vision teacher to Garrett County. Many of these children learn to read faster with Braille and could use it as an added tool.

This was not the first time Brandon has been asked to speak, and he has not only spoken at other events but recently was the recipient of a gift to help him purchase a laptop and software from the Deep Creek and Friendsville Lions clubs.

To Trudy, one of the best parts of having Brandon speak at the coin unveiling was that it gave him the opportunity to meet a variety of people, including a NASA engineer, the special assistant to President Barack Obama for disability policy, a singer, doctors, lawyers and parents who were all legally blind.

“I liked it,” Brandon said. “I can read and write. I can go to college.”

Because of his recent speech, Brandon and his sisters were invited to the White House on Thursday to participate in the annual egg roll.

Contact Sarah Moses at smoses@times-news.com.