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Building Your Tactile Literacy Toolkit

A picture of large textured circles that overlap. Inside are differently textured shapes including stars, circles, triangles, and squares in shades of red, yellow, and blue.

Tactile literacy is one of the cornerstones of education. Students who build their tactile literacy skills will be more successful at reading braille and understanding maps, graphs, and advanced geometry. Put tactile learning opportunities at your fingertips with this list of APH products.

  • Setting the Stage for Tactile Understanding is a tool for encouraging and informally assessing the development of early tactile literacy in young children. The kit includes 12 real objects (e.g., spoon, toothbrush, cube, cup, scissors) that can be paired with their two-dimensional counterparts.
  • The Flip-Over Concept Book series (TEXTURES, LINE PATHS, TELLING TIME, and PARTS OF A WHOLE) helps readers hone important tactile skills such as texture discrimination, line tracking, and shape recognition.

Collage of four Flip-Over Concept Books covers: Textures, Line Paths, Parts of a Whole, and Fractions

  • Textured Sorting Circles and Shapes is a large collection of magnetic-backed shapes (circles, triangles, squares, and stars) of contrasting textures (bumpy, smooth, and rough) and sizes (small, medium, and large). Use the colorful magnetic shapes in combination with APH’s All-in-One Board or Student Model All-In-One Board to complete matching, sorting, and sequencing activities.
  • Tactile Treasures allows you to assess a young student’s understanding of many basic concepts related to size, shape, quantity, position, comparison, and page orientation with worksheets that capture tactile molds of buttons, pretzels, gingerbread men, crayons, game tokens, and more.
  • Giant Textured Beads with Pattern Matching Cards encourage students to explore 3D solids (e.g., cubes, rectangular prisms, and cylinders) in combination with their 2D counterparts. Students can also pair the tactile matching cards with corresponding beads within a sturdy sorting tray.
  • Utilize StackUps: Spatial Reasoning Using Cubes and Isometric Drawings to reinforce students’ interpretation of raised-line graphics depicting 3-dimensional figures.
  • Web Chase is a fun game that teaches students tactile line tracking and texture discrimination skills. Players navigate their “spider” game tokens along web strands made with dotted and solid lines as they search for texture and shape prey.
  • The DRAFTSMAN Tactile Drawing Board, Quick-Draw Paper, and TactileDoodle can be used to create instant raised-line drawings and tactile displays.

green tactile doodle frame, back body, white lines showing the tactile drawing of an animal. a hand holds the stylus. The image is a tracing.

A variety of textured stripes on a black felt background

 

Are you looking for more APH products that support tactile learning? Don’t miss APH’s Tactile Skills Matrix for more possibilities. APH products are categorized by tactile skills including braille awareness, texture discrimination, line tracking, symbolic understanding, reading maps and graphs, and much more!

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