My Face Collage Self Portrait

Construction paper in various colors including skin tones

Glue stick

Scissors (adult use for pre-cutting)

Yarn, cotton balls, or paper strips for hair

A small hand mirror

Cut a large oval from paper that roughly matches your child's skin tone. This is the face base.

Pre-cut shapes for features — circles for eyes, a small triangle or button for the nose, a crescent for the mouth. Make them big enough for toddler hands.

Let your toddler look in a mirror. Point to their eyes, nose, mouth, and hair. Talk about what color their eyes are, what their hair looks like.

Glue the face oval onto a larger background sheet of paper.

Let your toddler place and glue the features onto the face. They might put eyes on the chin or the nose at the top — that is perfectly fine and completely normal.

Add hair by gluing yarn strands, torn paper strips, cotton balls, or curled paper on top of the head.

Write your child's name on the portrait and display it. Talk about the features — "There are your brown eyes! And your curly hair!"

Do not correct feature placement. A nose on the forehead is charming and developmentally typical. The process of thinking about facial parts matters more than accuracy.

Pre-cut all the shapes yourself. Toddlers at this age should be focusing on the placing and gluing, not the cutting.

Make one yourself alongside your toddler. Kids love seeing their grown-up's silly self-portrait.

Revisit this activity every few months. You will see a dramatic progression in how they represent faces over time.

Add extra materials like googly eyes (supervised, not for mouthers), buttons, or fabric scraps for more texture.