How to create a Tactile Tray

 Hi there,

Marnie is a huge fan of fiddling with little bits and bobs so I decided to make her a little Tactile Tray. It's such a simple thing to do so I thought I'd put a little post together to share my ideas.

Firstly you need to get yourself some sort of tray. The one I used was one Sam picked up from Poundland ages ago. It is one meant for storing screws, nails and things like that so it has handy dividers which you can move around. If you don't have one of these you can use any sort of tray, Tupperware or plastic container you have lying around the house.

Then you need to fill your container. You can fill it with anything you like. As you can see from Marnie's it is a random mix of things:

• Two different types of pasta - tubes and bows (or butterflies as Marnie calls them)
• Green lentils
• White rice
• Beads

These are all things I had in the cupboards at home. Other items you could use could be:

• Different types of rice - how about trying some wild rice, or you could dye rice with food colouring
• Buttons
• Different colours or shapes of pasta
• Broken up spaghetti
• Red lentils
• Peppercorns
• Popcorn kernels 
• Aquabeads (let them grow and then take the out of the water)

In addition to the tray I gave Marnie a snack pot so she could push items through the lid and pull them back out again and a spoon and her chopsticks (or as she calls them walking sticks). She enjoyed filling up the snack pot and then shaking it to see how much noise she could make. We talked about the colours of the beads and counted pasta.

What items have you got lying around that you could put in a tactile tray?

Lottie