On the morning of Tuesday 13th June, year 6 students at Stanley Road Primary School visited the Hive to look round the exhibition of IBBY’s Outstanding Books for Children and Young People with Disabilities 2017, and to take part in a workshop inspired by that collection. The workshop was organised and funded by the ICPBS in collaboration with the Hive library, and was run by Becky Palmer, one of the lecturers in Illustration at the University of Worcester, with support from Liam and Angie, two of our current undergraduates.  Participants collaborated to choose themes for four tactile books and work with a range of different materials to create pages on those themes. Tactile books are chiefly intended for readers with limited vision, as well as those who benefit from feeling as well as seeing pictures in the books they read.  Students were challenged to use new materials in creative ways, imagining how different textures might be used to represent skateboarders, football fans, lions, peacocks, shipwrecks, and plenty more besides.

The pages they made were afterwards sewn together as books for the participating classes at Stanley Road. The children who attended the workshop were so pleased with the results that they plan to share them with the reception classes at Stanley Road Primary as part of the school’s literacy program.