If you're in the US, there is a legal issue here: According to IDEA, this student has the legal right to an actual TVI who has highly specialized knowledge about how to teach the visually impaired (it goes far beyond braille) as well as an O&M specialist. What should be happening is that the TVI should be teaching the student braille and consulting you on how to best teach this student in your classroom. If the school is not providing that, you can reach out to the parents and tell them to request an IEP meeting to insist on these legally guaranteed services.

finger sensitivity is key. Fidget toys, beads on strings, feeding rope through holes or gluing straws to paper to make shapes, counting the dots on a tactile dice or dominoes, playing board games, untying knotted wires, arranging buttons and learning to use graph paper are all good pre-braille skills.
you might be able to progress to embossed braille mazes although they require very intricate Braille knowledge to prepare.
Braille lego or Braille Scrabble tiles are great for word games; there used to be a product called Braillephun but not sure it's around anymore.

I learned Braille from the age of 3 in the 1990's and the most limiting factor for me was the fact that the Braille material I had access to held very little relation to the print my sighted classmates were reading. It's very different now; I and my sighted friends use Kindle very comparably.
Obviously you'll eventually want to progress to an RBD, but even a tape-based Braille labeller will go a long way to normalising Braille in her daily life.

Are you in the US? Please please reach out to your state’s department for the blind. They have all the resources on what you (and they) can do. As you have recognized, just because she is blind does not mean she cannot learn.

If you are not in the US, please reach out to your country’s disability services office. Chances are they have a department to assist vision loss.

Im a TVI. If your student is so low functioning she is unable to cognitively grasp letters and written communication, braille will not work. It’s a very complex code. If it were me, I’d teach her communication skills through object or calendar schedules. If she starts to do well with that, you can create sight words with sticky braille (like putting the word coco puffs in braille on her coco puff cereal, something like that) and put them on objects she likes and interacts with regularly. She most likely won’t read the braille but would feel the orientation of the dots and make decisions that way. It’s complicated. I can’t say definitely without seeing her IEPs and records, but if she’s what I’m imagining, braille is out of the question.

Hi. Look and see if she is receiving VI services. There should be a TVI assigned to her. You cannot teach her braille. You are not educated or qualified. It’s not just an alphabet.

I had ran in to this once, sometimes the school systems can be so messed up. there was a student I had ran in to like this in my middle school year. I was volunteering or had one of my classes being TA. And I was her one on one for a period. They did pretty much the same things to her, put her in a corner and let her play with toys and stuff. She came to middle school and didn’t learn anything in elementary school.

It can be done. Me and this other teacher really trained her in braille.

This was me in 8th grade but I can tell you what me and this tvi did.

He gave me a brailler a huge stafk of paper and math flashcards.

I taught her how to load the paper we did that for a while. After that we started drilling the letters. I taught her the old school strict way. She could talk some but was still in the moderate to severe range. Anyway, her one saying about me was she’s nice but strict haha!

I would have her write as for a long time and then keep carriaging down and writing a and then do b after a long time of repeating a she had to say a while doing it. To remember. We did this for the alphabet. Repetition and memorization.

Is it the best approach. Probably not, I was what 13 or 14 at most? That’s the best method. Dad was very old school. We just did math flash cards too the ones with a few holes you can pull out of a holder if it was the right answer. we would drill and repeat them.

As a 37 year old who had a teachers aid help me through high school, I do wish I would’ve learned braille as I have a degenerative eye disease and am 3/4 blind. That being said, don’t rush her into learning from playing, it’ll be way too tough of a switch for her. Incorporate what you can do with what she’s already done. What you can teach her. I don’t like that you said they let her play and not learn, perhaps she learns through play. I hope you can find a way to connect the two so she can have the best school year possible. Best of luck to you both ❤️

Can you look into becoming certified as a TVI? I’m finishing up a great part time masters program for O and M and the school also offers TVI. (UMass Boston)