Caitie is sharing tips for using the preschool song “This Is A Happy Face” in the classroom and at home for lots of fun learning with little ones. She has lots of great ideas! And she’ll lead us through the song using gestures – an excellent way to introduce a song to children. “This Is A Happy Face” is wonderful song for learning about emotions and how we can express those emotions through our facial expressions.
Try these ideas in the classroom or at home!
- This song is all about exploring emotions and facial expressions. Encourage your students to make facial expressions as they sing – you can show what each facial expression might look like! The more exaggerated the facial expressions, the more fun and beneficial the song will be.
- Have students practice their facial expressions in front of a mirror. Each student can have a small hand held mirror to look at their face, or you can have many students in front of a big mirror.
- You can also pair students up and have them make the different faces for each other. See if they can guess what face their partner is making and then have them try to make the same face.
- Explore an emotions chart with your students! We have a printable Feelings Poster featuring Caitie making all the facial expressions from this song. See if your students can identify the different emotions being expressed in the pictures.
- You can also try making your own Feeling Poster with your students! You can use a digital camera to take photos of your students making the different faces, or have them draw pictures of the different facial expressions and put them together in a chart. You can label each face as a group and use the chart when you sing the song, pointing to each face as you sing.
- Try making a fun matching game with facial expressions. Print out two copies of our flashcards for This Is A Happy Face and place them face down on the table. Each student can take a turn picking two cards to flip over, namong the emotion on each card as they turn the cards over. If they are a match, they get a point. If they aren’t a match, they get turned over and someone else has a turn to guess where a match might be.
- You can also play a more active version of this matching game. Give each of your students an emotion to express, making sure that for each emotion there are two students in the class expressing that emotion. Then have your students make a face expressing that emotion, and have them walk around the room looking for the other student who is making the same face. When they find their match, they can sit down. Keep going until everyone has found their match and is sitting. Then go around the room and have everyone share their face and say what emotion they were expressing to see if they found their correct match.
- After you have sung the song, you can practice the different faces and the phrases ‘this is my’ and ‘show me your’ in a circle. Go around the circle and each student will get a chance to say ‘this is my’ and pick one of the emotions from the song and show their face. Then they can say ‘show me your’ and have the rest of the circle show their face of the same emotion. Keep going around the circle so everyone has a chance to use the vocabulary on their own and a turn to pick an emotion.
More resources for this song (1)
