Mirror Feelings Copycat
Your child pulls the face on the card, sees it in the mirror next to yours, and hears you name the feeling that goes with it.
- Age
- 2 to 5, best at 3
- Setup
- 2 min
- Play
- Under 5 min
- Materials
- Cards you draw
- Mess
- None
- You
- Play along
Activity KG-A020
What you need
A mirror and six cards you draw in two minutes with a marker. Circles, two dots and a line for the mouth is the entire artwork, and a plain drawing reads better at three than a photograph does.
- Six face cardsx6 Or: faces cut from a magazine. Or photos of family members on a phone. Or no cards at all. Six is the right number for a sitting this short. Draw happy, sad, cross, surprised, scared and sleepy, and stop there. Simple line faces work better than photographs because the eyebrows are the clearest thing on the card, and the eyebrows are what a three year old has to learn to look at.
- A mirror, at least 20 cm acrossx1 Or: the bathroom mirror with him standing on a step. Or a wardrobe mirror, sat on the floor. Or a dark phone screen. Both faces need to be in it at once, which is why a small compact mirror does not do the job. Side by side in one mirror is what makes the copy checkable; two separate mirrors turns it into two people pulling faces.
- A marker and some cardx1 Or: the backs of six old birthday cards. Or index cards. Draw them big, one face filling the card. Small faces get held close to the eyes and then nobody can see the mirror.
How to set it up
- Draw six faces, one per card, big and plain.2 min
- Sit side by side in front of the mirror, at the same height as her, kneeling or on the floor.20 sec
- Hold up the first card, pull the face yourself, and name the feeling in a sentence.15 sec
- Stop after five or six cards, while it is still going well.10 sec
What to say and what to do
Say
That is a surprised face. Look what my eyebrows did.
Now you pick one, and I will copy you.
- Name the feeling as a statement. A question turns this into a test in one line.
Do
- Copy her face back to her, exactly, before you do anything else. Being copied is the warm half of this and it is the half that makes her want another card.
- Get down to the same height. A face looked up at from below is a different face, and at three that matters more than it sounds like it should.
- Use the same words later in the day when something real happens. A feeling named at the mirror on Tuesday and again at the park on Wednesday is what makes the word stick.
Let be
- Silly faces that are not on any card. Silly faces are half of what makes this work at three, and they are the ones he is confident about.
- Sad and cross swapped over. From the inside at three they are very often the same event, and the sorting out takes a year or two.
- The same card asked for eight times running. Repeating one face is a three year old studying it.
What it looks like when it is working
- She looks at your face in the mirror rather than only at the card.
- He checks his own reflection to see whether the copy landed.
- The eyebrows start moving, not just the mouth.
- She names a feeling somewhere else that day, in a book or in the car, without the cards anywhere near.
What to expect at each age
At two
Copies the mouth and misses the eyes and eyebrows entirely. Names happy and sad, and finds the mirror itself more interesting than the cards.
Cross and scared usually turn up as words around three, and the eyebrows come with them.
Lasts 1 to 3 minutes
At three
Copies eyebrows as well as mouth, names four or five feelings, and starts attaching them to his own week: I was sad at the park. Picks a card for you to copy, which is the bigger half.
Reading a feeling on someone else's face when nobody has named it is a four and five year old thing, and it grows out of exactly this.
Lasts 3 to 5 minutes
At four and five
Matches a face to a situation rather than to a card, asks why a character in a book looks like that, and can tell you what would help someone who looks sad.
Two feelings at once, and naming a feeling while it is happening rather than afterwards, come later and are worth waiting for.
Lasts 5 to 10 minutes
When it goes sideways
Each of these is the activity telling you about its level or its warmth, and none of them needs more than a small change.
She will not look in the mirror
The mirror is the novelty and some three year olds find their own face at close range genuinely odd. It is not the part that matters.
Put the mirror away and sit knee to knee instead. The activity works exactly the same facing each other, and the mirror can come back in a few weeks.
He turns every card into a silly face
The silly face is the one he is sure of, so it is the safe answer to anything he is asked to perform.
Copy the silly face back precisely, twice, and laugh. Then slide in one card face and copy that with the same energy. The cards get taken seriously once the silly ones have been.
She names every card happy
Happy is the word that has been getting a good reaction, so it is being used as the answer to a question rather than as a description.
Stop asking what it is. Name it yourself for a few rounds: that is a cross face, look at the eyebrows. The naming transfers over a week or two of being heard.
It is over in ninety seconds
That is the honest length of this one at three. A short warm go is the version that gets asked for again.
Put the cards away while it is still going well and use them somewhere else instead. Point at a face on a page of a picture book at bedtime, one face, and that is the whole session.
Making it harder
Four rungs, and the cards only appear at the second one. The last rung has nothing to hold at all.
Copy me, no cards
- Ready when
- This is where it starts.
- What changes
- Just the two of you, side by side. You pull a face, she copies, you name it.
- What is new
- Watching a face closely enough to copy it, which is not automatic at two.
Six cards, you name them
- Ready when
- He copies your face and holds it for a second or two.
- What changes
- Six drawn cards, gone through slowly, with you saying the feeling each time.
- What is new
- A word attached to a face, heard often enough to be borrowed.
She picks, you copy
- Ready when
- She names two or three of the faces herself.
- What changes
- The cards go face down and she draws one, pulls it, and you copy her and guess.
- What is new
- Choosing a feeling to show on purpose, and seeing it land on somebody else's face.
When does somebody look like this
- Ready when
- He names most of the cards without help.
- What changes
- No mirror. Hold up a card and ask when somebody might look like that, then find the same face in a picture book.
- What is new
- Feelings attached to situations rather than to expressions, which is where this stops being a game and starts being useful.
Stop on a warm one. Ending on the sleepy card or the happy card, rather than on scared, is worth doing on purpose, and it takes ten seconds to reorder the pile.
How to keep it safe
Nothing here is sharp or small, so there are two lines and they are both about comfort.
- Use a hand mirror or one that is already fixed to a wall or a door. A propped mirror leaning against something is the one arrangement worth avoiding, and a bathroom mirror with a step in front of it solves it.
- Let a card be skipped. Scared and sad are the two a child may not want to hold on his own face, and passing on one is a perfectly good answer that keeps the whole thing safe to come back to.
Why this helps
A three year old feels things long before he can name them, and the gap between the two is where most of the hard afternoons live. Naming is what closes it, and naming has to be heard many times before it can be used. This puts a word and a face together in the same second, repeatedly, in a moment when nothing has actually gone wrong, which is the only time a child has enough spare attention to learn it.
The mirror does something specific that talking about feelings cannot. Copying a face means looking at eyebrows, eyes and mouth as a set rather than glancing at a whole face, and seeing your own version next to the original is immediate feedback nobody has to give out loud. That is also why this works better sitting shoulder to shoulder than facing each other: what she is comparing is two faces in one frame.
Skill practised: a feeling seen on a face and given its name
This is not emotional coaching and it is certainly not a quiz. A three year old does it because pulling faces with a grown-up is funny, and the vocabulary comes along for free.
One a week, at your child's age
We publish one new activity a week at each age, in exactly this format. What is hard to write down and easy to show here is the tone: statements rather than questions, and about three minutes end to end.
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Questions parents ask
Which feelings should be on the cards?
Happy, sad, cross, surprised, scared and sleepy is a strong six for three. Those are the ones with an obvious face and a word a three year old already half knows. Proud, disappointed, jealous and embarrassed are real and worth adding later, but they do not have a reliable face, so they belong in conversation rather than on a card.
Should I ask what feeling it is?
Not at three. A question makes it a test, and a test makes a child guess at the answer that pleases you rather than look at the face. Say the name yourself, plainly, and keep saying it. Asking becomes a good idea at four or five, once the words are already in use.
Do I need to buy emotion cards?
No. Six circles drawn with a marker do a better job than most printed sets, because you can make the eyebrows as obvious as you like. Photographs of real faces are harder to read at three, and family photos work best of all once the drawn ones are easy.
My child laughs at the sad face. Is that a problem?
No, and it is very common at three. Laughing is what happens when something is interesting and slightly odd, which a grown-up pulling an exaggerated sad face certainly is. Copy him back, carry on, and let the word do its work over the weeks. The seriousness comes later and it comes from real moments, not from this.