Wearing face masks is slowly becoming our new normal, which also means there’s just one more significant change that children likely aren’t used to seeing. Seeing masked individuals all over the place could absolutely make kids scared simply because of how different this looks and how far this is from their “normal”.
A great way to ease them into the understanding and acceptance of these masks is to make these SIMPLE face masks for them to wear and play with! With the shortage of face masks and since guidance is now indicating that everyone should be wearing them in public spaces, we tried to find some things around the house that would work to try and make some “kid style” masks (this activity goes along with the Episode 12: Covid-19 Superhero Face Mask if you want to relate the two).
We took paper towels = about 12 inches length of paper towel . Next you fold in into thirds (as seen in photos), bend both sides in about an inch and attach a rubber band, some kind of binder or string to the ends. After we had the rubber bands between the flap and the paper towel we decided to staple it closed so the binders couldn’t come out.
Decorate and use the binders to put around ears (you can use stickers, markers, glue, glitter, etc, magazine pictures). Obviously they won’t be the best quality but kids love them! Make sure to write your child’s name on the back of the mask so that we don’t share masks with each other.
My family did these paper towel face masks last night on Zoom for my brothers’s birthday. We all had decorated masks and wrote “Happy Birthday” on them. Feel free to use these masks for any occasion!
