Making Faces

0-5 minutes

10 minutes

Markers and construction paper

Draw and cut out faces that show different feelings with your child, such as angry, sad and happy. Encourage the child to use the faces to tell you how she is feeling. You can also use these faces to describe how characters in books and movies are feeling.

Instead of drawing faces, you can cut out different parts of faces, eyebrows, eyes, and mouth to show different emotions. Your child can then put the different features together to show different emotions. Use recent or memorable examples when you talk about times when you or your child might feel different emotions. Such as "when you gave me a hug this morning, I felt happy" or "I was excited when we went on the ferris wheel at the fair".

Talk very simply about your own feelings as examples.

Introduce words for feelings such as: disappointed, hurt, thrilled, excited.

Adapted from South Australia, Department of Education and Child Development