Six Dots: A story of Young Louis Braille

Six Dots tells the story of Louis Braille, the inventor of the Braille Alphabet. As a young child, Louis loved to watch his father work in his shop. Although he was too small to help out, he would hang around his father and admire his work. His father would always remind him not to touch anything, especially because he was too young. This bothered Louis and he set out to prove his worth to his father. Unfortunately, this led to an accident that caused loss of sight in Louis' eyes at the age of five.

Louis was a clever boy, however, and he was determined to live just like any other child in spite of his blindness. What he wanted most was the ability to participate in school like all the children around him; he wanted to read and write. He found that there were no books for the blind in his small community, so he traveled to the school for the blind in Paris to fulfill his dream of being able to read books. Even at the school for the blind, there were no books that he could read.

Using inspiration from a French army captain, Louis invented his own alphabet that could be read by touch. Six dots were arranged in different positions to represent each letter and number. At the young age of fifteen, he created a system that is still used throughout the blind community today.

Just like El Deafo, I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I am deeply committed to understanding the blind community and love to learn about innovations that have made every day pleasures more accessible to people with vision impairments. This gave beautiful insight into the world of someone that could once see, but lost their sight.

The illustrations were beautiful, but I particularly enjoyed the parts in which Louis was describing his experience. The pages were black with subdued, blue images. On some pages, Louis could be seen in color, as this is what he remembers himself looking like.

I was so interested in this young boy's story and had no clue this is how the Braille alphabet came to be! I think that this would be an incredible topic to talk about with students, especially with the opportunity to weave some form of an engineering project into the lesson.

The most powerful part of the book, in my opinion, was the part when Louis was describing the sounds that he had become familiar. He stated that he heard the neighbor's dog, which was "chained too tight, alone in the dark." He likened this dog to himself and explained that he knew just how the dog felt. I really connected with this section and felt deeply what Louis was feeling.

I would definitely include this book in my classroom library, as it is an incredible piece of literature that taught me so much!

Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille 
By: Jen Bryant
Illustrated by: Boris Kulikov
Published in 2016