Paper Bag Mask

Recommended Age Group: 2 Years +

Materials Required:

• Large Grocery Store Paper Bags
• Scissors
• Yarn
• Glue
• Markers

Instructions:
Let your child’s imagination soar when you create a paper bag mask or several. This is a great activity to do on a play date so your child has company. (You won’t be able to play along unless you are extremely small framed.)

With your child’s willing help, place the bag over her head and use a marker to put dots at her shoulders, eyes, and mouth on the outside of the bag. Remove it from your child and let her help you draw circles at the arms, eyes and mouth. Carefully cut away these circles.

Make the armholes large enough to allow your child freedom of movement, but keep the eyes and mouth a reasonable size – large enough to see and get fresh air inside the mask, but small enough that they don’t show her whole face.

Try the bag on for size and make any adjustments necessary to the face or arm holes. Then let your child help cut lengths of yarn to use as the mask’s hair. Glue the hair to the mask. You can glue a bit of hair to the front leaving the back bare or glue hair all over the “head” of the mask if you’d prefer. You can even let your child style the hair if she’d like.

When the glue is dry, carefully fold the bag flat and use the markers to draw on the rest of the facial features. Make the features large and cartoonish to compensate for the big bag and go ahead and include a shirt around the arm holes.

When everything is ready, help your child into her new mask and let her play pretend for as long as she’d like. Just be sure to stay near at hand in case she needs help getting the mask off again.