Family Face Album — Snap and Match the Feeling

A home-made photo matching game. You and your child pull feeling faces for the camera, then use the pictures to practise reading the five basic expressions — happy, sad, angry, scared and surprised — on faces the child actually knows.

  1. Take turns being photographer. For each feeling, both of you (and any willing sibling or grandparent) pull the face — one photo per person per feeling. Aim for 10–15 pictures.
  2. Look through the pictures on the phone, or print them small and cut them into cards. Before any matching, just talk about one or two — “Look at Grandpa’s eyebrows here. What are they doing?”
  3. Play Find the Feeling — say “Show me someone who is surprised” and the child points to or picks up a matching photo.
  4. Play Name the Feeling — you hold up one photo and the child says what the person is feeling and which part of the face told them (“her mouth is open and her eyes are big”).
  5. Play Same Feeling, Different Face — the child pairs up two different people showing the same feeling.
  6. Finish with a silly round where the child pulls a face and you have to guess it.

Variation: cover the bottom half of a photo with your hand so only the eyes and eyebrows show, then swap and show only the mouth. Which half gives the feeling away? Or add a sixth face, disgusted (“yuck!”), once the first five are easy.

Requirements

  • Space: Any — sofa, table or floor
  • Surface: A table or floor to lay the photos out if printed
  • Materials: A phone or camera; optionally printed photos, scissors and card to back them
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; extra family members make better photos
  • Supervision: Moderate — the adult leads the talk about facial clues

Rationale & Objective

Being able to read a face is the foundation of non-verbal communication. Research on emotion knowledge (Izard et al., 2001; Denham et al., 2003) shows that preschoolers who can recognise and label facial expressions are rated as more socially competent and get on better with peers in later years. At age 5 most children read happy reliably, while scared, surprised and sometimes angry versus sad are still being sorted out (Widen & Russell, 2003) — which is why pointing out the specific clues (eyebrows, eyes, mouth) matters more than drilling labels. Photo-based “feeling faces” are a core tool of the Preschool PATHS curriculum and the CSEFEL/Pyramid Model family materials; using familiar faces makes the task more meaningful and brings it closer to the real job of reading the people the child lives with.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: reliably picks out happy; mixes up sad and angry, or scared and surprised; answers “good” or “bad” rather than a feeling word
  • Developing: identifies 3–4 of the five feelings from photos; can point to one facial clue when asked (“his mouth is down”)
  • Proficient: identifies all five basic feelings from photos of different people; matches the same feeling across two faces 5 times out of 6; names the clue without prompting
  • Advanced: reads a face from the eyes or the mouth alone; notices mixed or mild expressions (“a little bit worried”); spontaneously comments on real faces during the day

Safety Notes

  • Keep it light — pretend faces only. Do not photograph a child who is genuinely upset to use as a card
  • Some children dislike being photographed or seeing their own picture; let them be photographer only, or use drawings and magazine faces instead
  • Ask family members before printing or sharing their photos
  • A 5-year-old who still cannot tell happy from sad or angry faces after plenty of relaxed practice, or who rarely looks at faces at all, is worth mentioning to a pediatrician or speech-language pathologist

Hints

  • Playfulness: ham it up for the camera — the more exaggerated the adult’s faces, the more the child laughs and looks closely. Let the child direct you (“more scared, Daddy!”)
  • Sustain interest: add new people over time (cousins, a neighbor, the dog “looking guilty”), or keep the cards in a small album the child can flick through alone
  • Common mistake: quizzing like a test and correcting every slip. Instead wonder aloud (“hmm, I see wide eyes — could it be surprised or scared?”) and let the child look again
  • No-equipment adaptation: skip the photos and play face to face — one pulls a feeling face, the other guesses, then swap. A mirror works well too
  • Cross-domain: tell a one-sentence story for each photo (“she is surprised because…”) for narrative language; sort cards into groups and count them for early math
  • Progression: find the named feeling → name the feeling shown → say which clue gave it away → match across different people → read half-covered faces → add disgusted and milder feelings

Sources

  • Izard, C. et al. (2001), “Emotion knowledge as a predictor of social behavior and academic competence in children at risk,” Psychological Science
  • Denham, S.A. et al. (2003), “Preschool emotional competence: Pathway to social competence?” Child Development
  • Widen, S.C. & Russell, J.A. (2003), “A closer look at preschoolers’ freely produced labels for facial expressions,” Developmental Psychology
  • Domitrovich, Cortes & Greenberg (2007), randomized trial of the Preschool PATHS curriculum (feeling-face lessons), Journal of Primary Prevention
  • CSEFEL / Pyramid Model family materials — “Teaching Your Child to Identify and Express Emotions”
  • CASEL framework — Social Awareness (taking others’ perspectives; showing concern for the feelings of others)
  • Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 2b — responds to emotional cues