🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🌿 Sensory Exploration — Handling varied craft materials — soft fabric, rough sandpaper, smooth clay, scratchy burlap — builds sensory discrimination and supports the processing skills that some children need additional practice with.
• 🖐️ Fine Motor Skills — Cutting, gluing, folding, and manipulating craft materials directly exercises the small hand muscles and finger precision required for handwriting and other fine-detail tasks.
• 🎨 Creativity & Self-Expression — Making freely chosen creative decisions — which colors, shapes, and materials to use — develops a child's personal artistic voice and the confidence to express original ideas across all areas of life.
• 🌈 Color & Pattern Recognition — Selecting, mixing, and arranging colors and patterns sharpens visual discrimination — the ability to notice subtle differences — which transfers directly to letter and number recognition in early literacy and math.

The Just Like Me Paper Plate mask is simple to make and your preschooler will enjoy making something that looks like them. The mask is hand-held rather than fastened around the head, which prevents the problems with seeing that some masks can cause. Preschoolers love masks because it gives them an opportunity to tell stories and pretend, even if who they are pretending to be is themselves.

Materials You Will Need:

Paper plates
Wide craft sticks
Crayons or markers
Construction paper
Yarn or curling ribbon for to match your preschooler's hair 
Scissors
School glue

How to Make it

Step1:
Set up a fairly large full-face picture of the preschooler to look at. If you don’t have one, set up a mirror on the table.  

Step 2:
Tell the preschool child that you are going to make masks that look like yourselves. Have the preschooler observe his/her picture. Discuss things like the color of his/her eyes, hair, etc.

Step 3:
Let the preschooler pick a crayon that he or she feels represents the color of his/her skin (don’t worry if it’s green) and color the entire front of the plate using the side of a peeled crayon. 

Step 4:
Draw where to cut out two eye holes, a nose hole, and a mouth hole. Start a small hole in the center of each of these, insert the preschooler's scissors and cut out.

Step 5:
Have your preschooler color the facial features to look like his or her own.

Step 6:
Attach the craft stick for a handle at this point. The rest is 3-dimentional and you will not want to squash it by putting the plate front down. Let the handle dry completely before you continue.

Step 7:
For a nose, the preschool can color a piece of white construction paper the same color s/he colored the plate, then cut the paper into the shape of a long triangle. Fold it in half with the narrowest point at the top of the fold and the base of the triangle at the bottom. Open it up to form 3-dimentional shape.  Attach it to the mask over the nose hole, gluing the point at the top and the two sides, but leaving the bottom unglued. 

Step 8: 
To add hair, the preschooler can cut strips of yarn glue them on. For curly hair, you can help the preschooler curl lengths of curling ribbon. For wavy hair, you can curl the ribbon loosely.  

Helpful Tips for Parents

Tip 1:
It's a good idea to make a mask yourself ahead of time to use as an example. Then the preschooler knows what you are talking about when you talk about making a mask. Just follow the instructions given for the child. Then, when you sit down with the preschooler, plan to make one yourself to model the process. 

Tip 2:
Some very small children may not create any part of the face other than the eyes or the eyes and mouth. That’s fine. He or she may not be ready. You can ask the child what’s missing from his or her picture and point to other parts of the face either on your face or on the mask you have made, but if they don’t get it, don’t sweat it. 

A Simpler Preschool Paper Plate Mask

If the Just Like Me Preschool Paper Plate Mask is too complex for your preshooler at ths time, you might want to start with The Basic Preschool Paper Plate Mask.

More Uses for Your Preschool Paper Plate Masks

Use the masks to engage in dramatic play with your preschooler. Make up stories and act them out together.

Let your preschooler pick a favorite book with only a few characters in it. Make masks that resemble the characters in the books and use them when you speak in the voice of chat character.