Feelings & confidence
Emotion mirror
Suggested age: Ages 4 to 9
Choose the eyebrows, eyes and mouth, and build the face of each emotion.
Choose the difficulty
For parents and caregivers
How the Emotion mirror supports your child’s development
Before a child can say “I’m sad” or “I’m scared”, they need to recognize what those emotions look like. This game turns that learning into a puzzle of faces. Here is how to play, what it builds and how to keep going at home.
How to play
Your child sees the name of an emotion and, on easy and medium, a face to copy. They choose eyebrows, eyes and a mouth to build that same face and tap “Done!”. If a part doesn’t match, the game says which one to look at again, with no penalty. On hard there is no face to copy: they read what happened to a character and decide which face fits.
What they are learning
Recognizing emotions on a face is the basis of empathy and self-regulation: you can’t manage what you can’t name. By building the face piece by piece, your child discovers exactly what changes (the eyebrows, the eyes, the mouth) and grows their feelings vocabulary beyond “good” and “bad”.
Ideas to keep going at home
- Play the real mirror game: one makes a face and the other guesses the emotion.
- When reading a story, ask: how do you think this character feels? how can you tell?
- Name your own emotions out loud: “I’m tired”, “that made me happy”.
- When they are upset, help them name what they feel before looking for a solution.
A tip from Mora: play together for a short while, 5 to 10 minutes, and talk when you finish. Screens work best as a starting point for family conversations rather than as a solo activity: real learning happens in the conversation, which is the heart of the Mora method.