Guide
Preschool: 2D tactile materials supporting play and literacy
Looking for ways to enrich your preschooler's experiences?
This is the first post in a series of providing tactile graphic rich environments for preschool and elementary students. This post has four easy ideas of how to provide two-dimensional tactile elements that support play and literacy for preschoolers.
Play Boards
This tactile play board was created with the students and is made from a cardboard box which has been unfolded and laid flat on a table. This particular play board is “The little Farm” with a house with a pointed roof created from foam sheets with raised windows and doors, a rectangular foam barn, two ponds outlined in Wiki Styx, a garden with various foam sticker shapes. There is print and braille labeling these items. The group of kids are playing with small plastic farm animals and plushy animals, plus several cardboard boxes perfect for ‘buildings’ (such as the animal hospital in their play) for the plushy animals. This play board can be used as a center activity in the preschool classroom with multiple students. It is a wonderful social activity engaging students to play together while encouraging pretend play.
Image 1: The Little Farm Play Board
Story Boards
The Story Board has a story in braille and print, 2D image of an outline of a house, foam stars and a foam sliver moon in the sky, a foam fish (with raised fins), a turtle with a textured back and eyes, and a wavy line for the ground with ‘bumps’ representing crickets. The board itself is a recycled braille textbook cover or can be order on APH Quota: Covers for Braille Documents. Nearby is a 3D plastic turtle and a plushy fish. The story board with its tactile illustrations is an engaging literacy activity that helps the student to develop concepts as it links the salient features of 3 dimensional objects with two dimensional tactile drawings.
Image 2: Fish and Turtle Story Board
Tactile drawings
Just like sighted peers have access to visual ‘educational’ drawings around the classroom, students who are blind should have access to interesting tactile drawings. Place simple tactile drawings on vertical spaces at preschooler height around the classroom; after reviewing the drawing with an educator, have the student help place the drawing on the vertical space and encourage him/her to explore these drawings during free time.
These teacher-created hand drawings continue to build the student’s concepts and the tactile images are models for student drawings. Drawings are not intended to be perfect and require a little piece of imagination to identify the animals. Jessica purposefully includes salient features in her animal drawings, such as the duck’s webbed feet. Jessica and Logan explore the drawings together, discovering the salient features used to identify the animal, ‘reading’ the braille together, and counting the number of the each set of animals. Logan uses the drawings to help him recall the braille words.
This drawing was created using a tactile drawing board. The drawing has “2 little bucks” and “2 little ducks” in print and braille, along with 2 hand drawn bucks and two hand drawn ducks.
Image 3: Raised line tactile drawing
Link to academic tactile graphics
As always, students should be introduced to the real object (if appropriate and available), then a realistic 3D object, before moving to a 2D object. The next step is to introduce ‘academic’ tactile graphics that Logan will be exposed to in class, such as educational materials created by APH and/or tactile graphics found in braille textbooks. In this activity, Jessica has Logan compare the more familiar plushy fish to the 2D diagram of a fish available through APH Sense of Science kit.
Image 4: Logan with one hand the plushy fish and one hand on the 2D tactile diagram of a fish.
In the video below, Jessica discusses these four types of resources; video clips of Logan are embedded into Jessica’s video.
Transcript for 1 Preschool: 2D tactile materials supporting play and literacy video.
Key points
- Don’t limit your expectations!
- Help make meaning out of tactile imagery – teach salient features and build conceptual understanding, learn from your student
- Tactile details in drawings are symbols for things in the world and concepts (just like the braille alphabet are symbols for letter names and letter sounds)
- Drawing is universal, purposeful, and needed and follows a developmental progression whether it is visual or tactile – provide the tools!
- Support inclusion and access: make student’s tactile drawings visually accessible, provide and encourage use of tactile drawing tools by sighted peers and family
Preschool Strategies to support fluency with tactile pictures and drawing
- Pair real toys and objects with 2D tactile materials
- Use story and play and make it social
- Follow child’s lead
- Focus on familiar, preferred characters, story lines, and use repetition
- Model enjoyment and exploration
- Describe and help student notice and describe tactile details
- Look with your hands with the student
- Use hand under hand to allow student to watch what you do
- Provide the tools for tactile drawing… in every environment – make it as easy as reaching for pen and paper
- Add pictures to student’s “scribble brailling” – tell the story while touching, have other students do the same (put tactile drawings/braille up where kids can touch them easily)
- Don’t worry about how to hold tools but keep things stable with trays, non-slip mats or grippy shelf liner
- Have family model drawing and draw with child
- Tell stories while drawing – scribbles can have meaning too! Make collaborative drawings – start to model concepts, “I’m making a circle for the cat’s head and triangles for the ears”
- Include preschooler in social drawing and art and have other kids use those tools (quick draw paper, ball point pen on Draftsman or APH Doodle, Sensational Blackboard, sticky boards)
- Help all adults, family, peers get comfortable with language around “seeing,” use all the words for looking, seeing, feeling, touching, watching, noticing, observing, etc. with hands and eyes
Resources
Other posts in this series:
- Tactile graphic rich environments series: The missing link, Intro
- Preschool: 2D tactile materials supporting play and literacy, part 1
- Early elementary: Tactile pictures and drawing, engaging student in literacy activities, part 2
- Upper elementary: Tactile pictures supporting literacy and social connections, part 3
- Tactile drawing: Expanding creativity and social inclusion, part 4
- Tactile description: Building language and concepts, part 5
- HOW TO turn tactile drawing film into PIAF picture – sharpie method, part 6
- HOW TO make a tactile image using iPad, Goodnotes and Swell Machine, part 7
Ideas and videos are by Jessica McDowell; post co-written by Diane Brauner
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