Learning about Emotions — Make a Face!
Learn about emotions with this DIY toy with rotating facial features, made from cardboard and a few fasteners. Turn the eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth to create hundreds of different facial expressions — happy, sad, angry, surprised and everything in between.
Includes a ready-to-colour template and a blank version to design your own face. A wonderful hands-on activity for young children learning to recognise and name emotions.
You will need: 6 fasteners, cardboard, craft knife, glue, needle and thread.
How to make your Make A Face emotion toy
1. Print the template and mount on a piece of cardboard. If using the blank template, colour and decorate your own fun face. Cut around all the shapes and make holes where marked.
2. Insert the fasteners through each eye, eyebrow, nose and mouth piece, then through the holes in the correct position on the circular face. Close the fasteners at the back.
3. Glue the pink cheek and teardrop on both sides of two cardboard circles cut to the same size. Thread a needle and put the thread through the top of this circle, then insert both ends through the hole in the face and fix at the back. The circle will dangle freely — flip it to show either a rosy cheek or a teardrop.
Now you can turn the facial features and flip the cheek/tear disc to create all sorts of expressions! Try making some and guessing the emotion together.
How to play
Write emotion words on small cards — happy, sad, angry, furious, surprised, embarrassed, worried, disappointed, pleased, proud, confident — and hang them with threads. Set the face to match an emotion, then find the right word card to place in front of it. Great for building emotional vocabulary in young children.
Check out our emotion flash cards and other DIY toy templates for more ideas.
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