Not surprisingly, most children love making collages. So making a Photo Face Collage is an excellent activity for combining social skills and recognizing facial expressions. Children will have fun with this game while they are building a variety of skills!

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There are endless amounts of different collagés that you can make; this Photo Face Collagé focuses on faces and feelings. Many children with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience face blindness. One boy that I know worked on recognizing the faces of the children in his preschool class for the entire school year. By the end of the year, he could recognize half the photos of the kids in his class. Imagine going through life without recognizing people easily. This activity can help with face recognition as well as a variety of other skills.

Other children are ready to learn about different types of feelings. This Photo Face Collage is really an I Spy Feelings game. Have the kids find a particular feeling.

Target skills for Photo Face Collage Will Vary Depending on What Game You Choose to Play:

• Face Recognition
• Phonics
• Higher Order Thinking
• Emotions
• Fine Motor
• Visual Scanning

• Photographs (or you can download our photo face collage.)
• Scissors
• Glue
• Poster Board
• Index Cards (or you can download our feelings cards.)

• Print pictures of several photos of people in your child’s life. You can supplement various expressions with pictures downloaded from the internet to make this Photo Face Collage.
• Cut out only the faces. For the child who is still learning to cut with scissors draw a circle around the face as a
  guideline.
• Glue onto poster board.
• Write the different feelings in the photos on an index card.

Once your Photo Face collage is complete there are several games that you can play:

Find the Feeling: 

Have the kids pick a feelings card and find the facial expression that matches.

Learning about adjectives and attributes:

Call out certain features or attributes such as, "Who has long hair?". You can work on directionality by asking, “Who is to the left of the girl with the blonde, curly hair?” Or “Who is above the boy with the glasses?” etc.

Work on phonics: 

You can work on phonics by asking the child to point to the person whose name starts with a “B”.
You can extend this by asking for the last letter of that person’s name. This game will only work if you have used pictures of familiar people.

Act out the Feelings:

Have fun with emotions. Ask the child to identify the emotion on a certain face and then act out that emotion.

Be sure to add silliness into the game so that your child stays engaged.
It would actually be fun to adapt this game for travel and add pictures of people and places that the child is likely to see on their trip.