I absolutely love these cut outs! They’re a great (FREE) way to help children who are struggling with recognizing facial expression. In addition to these fun and easy-to-use cut-outs, be sure to check out all my amazing products for helping build a variety skills in children by clicking here!!

Recognizing facial expressions may be an area of difficulty because the child is on the autism spectrum, but it may also simply be that the child struggles a bit with reading social cues. Many typically developing children also need a little extra help learning to identify facial expressions and understand emotions. In addition to practicing with facial expression cut-outs, another great way to build emotion understanding is with my multi-day engaging lesson plan set – Calm Caterpillars. Directly teaching facial expression identification and recognition to young children can be extremely helpful in supporting their emotional development.

There are tons of ways to teach emotion understanding and facial expression identification. A few ideas for simple strategies are included below, you can find more ideas for building emotion skills on my website – click here to learn about teaching flexible thinking, here to learn how to help kids calm down, and here to help kids accept their mistakes without frustration! The strategies below use items you likely already have on hand. In addition, it can help to use the facial expression pictures included at the end of this post for additional practice. A variety of strategies for using these printable facial expression pictures can also be found at the end of this post!

Facial Expressions and Child Development

Teaching children to recognize facial expressions is an important child development milestone. Children begin to realize that other people have feelings and that those feelings are different from their own. In order to know what feeling another person has, the child learns he or she must look for clues such as the person’s facial expressions or body language. Although children begin to realize the importance of reading facial expressions in other people, they often need a little support learning how to actually do it. The activities below are fun and easy ways to teach facial expressions.

Teaching Facial Expression Recognition

Use picture books. When you sit with your child and read a picture book, stop to point out the faces of the characters (human or animal). Ask the child how the character feels. If the child struggles to identify the right feeling, take a moment to point out specific features that may be good clues. You might say, “Look, she is smiling, that means she feels…” and see if your child can list the feeling or “His head is looking down and his arms are pulled tight around his body, that probably means he feels…” By pointing out the facial and body cues the characters provide, your child may be able to identify the feeling. If your child still struggles, provide the answer. You could say, “She is smiling, that means she’s feeling happy!” or “His head is down and his arms are pulled around him, that usually means someone feels sad.” By linking the feeling to the cues, you’ll help your child start to see the connections.

Play facial expression charades. Write out a list of feelings and take turns acting out the feeling using only your face. For children who can’t read, consider using facial expression pictures, either printed from the internet or simple faces you’ve drawn. Have your child take turns both guessing the feeling you are showing as well as acting out feelings.

Play facial expression hot/cold. Have you ever played hot or cold to help your child find something? As she nears the item, you start saying, “you’re getting warm, super warm, you’re boiling hot!” or as he gets further away you say, “you’re getting colder, way colder, you’re ice cold!” This game works the same way, but instead of saying warmer or colder, you’ll use facial expressions. In this game, warm is happy and cold is sad (or mad). As the child gets closer your face looks slightly happy, happy, very happy, super excited. As the child gets further you look neutral, slightly sad, very sad, pretending to cry. Your child has to remember to keep checking back at your face as he or she walks around to find the object, which encourages lots of looking at people and attending to their faces. After a few tries, let your child hide something and give you clues to find it using his or her expressions!

Use printables. Another great way to teach emotions is to use the facial expression pictures included in this post. You can use the facial expression pictures to create pages of eyes, eyebrows, and mouths that can be mixed and matched to create lots of different emotions.

When you’re ready to use the printable facial expression pictures, try a few different ways to play!

1. Name an emotion (e.g., happy) and have your child use a variety of the facial expression pictures to create a face that matches the emotion you said.
2. Name a situation (e.g., you lose your favorite toy) and have your child use the facial expression pictures to create a face that matches the emotion they would feel in the situation you said.
3. Make an emotion face using the printable facial expression pictures and have your child identify the feeling shown.
4. Read a book, and as you read, stop and have the child use the printable facial expression pictures to make faces that match how certain characters would feel at each major plot event.
5. Create magnets by printing the facial expression pictures, laminating them, and attaching magnet tape to the back. Put them on your refrigerator or another magnetic surface and have fun playing with the faces and seeing how many different emotions you can create.

Teaching emotion understanding is a complex skill, but an important one! A key piece of that skill is being able to recognize common facial expressions. By practicing with the printable facial expression pictures or playing the games described, you can help your child gain emotion understanding skills in a fun and engaging way!

Want to learn more about social-emotional skills? Check out this page filled with links! Access my emotion-focused multi-day curriculum: Calm Caterpillars. Discover a variety of supports for parents here. I’ve also written some guest posts addressing emotions – click here to check out my guest posts! Or check out my downloadable book on managing emotional/behavioral struggles in kids here!