How I Turned My Daughter’s Children’s Books into a Rich Tactile Experience

Reading books with children (all children) is so important, but it’s equally important to adapt books for children with visual impairments so they can get more from the experience. Adding tactile elements to the pages, such as different fabrics and textures, can add context and make the experience more fun and interesting. With this method, they can use their different senses to learn. Note: making books visually accessible for children with Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) is a different story—far different from simply adding tactile elements to a book. To adapt a book specifically for CVI so it’s more visually accessible, read this post.

When I adapted the popular children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”, I immediately noticed a difference in how my daughter engaged in story-time. She was so interested in touching the different textures and turning the pages to see what’s next. With suggestions from her speech therapist to follow her lead and OWL (observe, wait and listen), I was able to engage in back-and-forth communication with her about what she was clearly very interested in. Rather than reading all the lines in the book, or reading the pages in order, I commented to say things like, “The dog’s fur is soft” or “The fish feels rough”, if that’s what she was interested in exploring. She was able to get that immediate tactile feedback by touching the faux fur I added to the dog, or the scaly-feeling beads I glued onto the fish.

To adapt your children’s books, all you need is a glue gun for board books or strong tacky glue for paper books, and different materials from your arts & crafts bin. The dollar store is a great place to shop for this kind of stuff. Try different fabrics, buttons, beads, velcro, feathers, small bells, lego pieces, rhinestone stickers, sand paper, etc. When I adapted our book, I tried to make the texture match the animals in the story. Have fun with it!