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Touch & Feel Books For Ages 12+ Months

Quick Notes

• 1-year-olds are still going love the sensory books from the 6-12-month stage, even more so now that they can confidently turn pages and sit with the books and ponder them independently.
• Our goal at this age is to counter the stereotypes and misinformation kids are starting to pick up from watching the people and media around them.
• Honestly we really had a hard time finding great touch & feel books. I’ll add more here as I find them.
• Normalizing diversity
  • Representing a wide variety of identities
  • Featuring marginalized people with agency
  • Showing people who we have privilege over as peers and competent equals
  • Showing that not all homes and neighborhoods look like the ones we live in
  • Seeing reflections of our own families and experiences as valuable and worthy of representation
• Focus on familiarity over novelty:
  • At this age they will want to re-read the same book over and over for a few weeks or even months in a row.
  • Repetition: They’ll develop interests in particular themes: trucks, farm animals, beards (yes, like the facial hair), babies, etc. Just run with it. If you get really sick of a particular book, try getting another book with the same theme to mix it up and keep yourself from dying of boredom.
  • Reading 1 book together for weeks develops comfort, familiarity, and mastery. Those ‘1,000 books before kindergarten‘ programs are designed to shame exhausted and poor parents and are backed by lazy research and folks who need you to buy books to keep their jobs. Owning books is correlated with children’s success (which correlate with having a place to live and money to buy books), not reading them. Don’t fall for it.
• Cognitive Development: From 12-18 months
  • Starting to get excited about properties of items (colors, shapes). They’re starting to understand properties (ex: red, soft) and putting language to experience.
  • Can follow simple directions, “Can you point to the purple cat?”
  • Non-linear reading: Don’t expect a kid under 3 to sit still and read a book cover-to-cover. Around 18 months and again at 2.5 years and 3.5 years, your kid will have a big cognitive leap and will be more ready for storybooks with increasingly linear story lines.
• Aim for durability
  • Some kids are delicate and cautious. Mine were not. Expect all books to be tugged, thrown, and stepped on. Never leave them alone with a library book. This is not the time for delicate flaps and pop-up books.

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Quick & Messy Book List:

Also see:

• Blindness & Vision disability (there are some touch & feel books in there)
•  6-12-month stage collection has some touch & feel books too

Books we enjoyed

• Little Pink Book– SUCH a good sensory book. Too bad it’s out of print. There is also a Little Black Book, but the pink one felt like it had more interesting stuff. AAPI maker
• Fuzzy Fuzzy Fuzzy! Nice large touch areas which works well for kids who haven’t mastered precision motor control

Problematic Books

• It’s a small world furry friend – disney book group – touch and feel interactive sensory board book. no child for Africa section but kids for other countries. Aboriginal child is white. Problematic whitewashing

Filler Books

Books that are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get. I’m just putting them here to get them out of my way while sorting the rest of my notes.

• my first wonder woman  – cute, with caveats – text is similar to pat the bunny. As usual, bad/good guys dynamic because heaven forbid we have superheroes with a growth mindset.  Not the BEST touch and feel book, but super cute if you’re into Wonder Woman. At the end, we see “Wonder woman is one of the world’s strongest super heroes. Look – there’s another little super hero!” And the reader sees a mirror. All the superheroes pictured in the crowd are white, so we’re skipping this. 6m-3.5
• Pat the Bunny, if you can stand the comb binding (I cannot – auditory sensory HELL) and the smell of the ‘flowers.’ I see they have a hardcover and paperback, which I haven’t gotten my hands on. I’ve never seen a copy without a comb binding. But then again, I don’t get out much.
• fuzzy yellow ducklings – matthew van fleet – got this used, neither kid paid much attention to it at all, so I’m donating it now at 3 & 5, touch & feel, flap, shapes, animals and colors – SHOULD be an effective book, and it’s well executed, it jut didn’t hold our attention. nice large patches for touch & feel, plus has some textures we usually don’t find, like sticky, wooly, scaly, etc. Not a bad book, but nothing exciting about it either. interactive, but doesn’t work well at potty time because at the age when all of his is interesting, you’ll need to read it out loud “furry gray square…koalas” its about learning the descriptive words for things, so not great for independent play