The mirror game is a fun activity that supports a range of skills. It can support your child’s visual and motor planning skills as well as supporting children to read and understand facial expressions of others to support their social skills. To play this game sit with your partner and take turns being the mirror and the leader. The leader’s job is to make silly facial expressions and the mirror’s job is to copy the leader’s facial expressions.
Extensions: To work on emotional literacy and reading facial expressions of others, after the mirror copies the facial expression of the leader, have the mirror try to guess what emotion might match that facial expression. If you are having difficulty coming up with face to make, write down a list of emotions and try to think of what expression you would make for each of those emotions. Make faces into an actual mirror to see what it looks like when you try making different facial expressions!
Tips: If your child is having difficulty looking directly at their partner, have them sit side by side or at an angle. You can also pull up pictures of different emotions online and see if they can copy the expressions from the online images.
