Faces come in all shapes and sizes and our brains are incredibly good at recognising them.
In this activity you and your kids will explore your ability to find faces in everyday
objects.
OK, year four, today we're going to do some investigating into facial recognition
and finding faces.
This activity is about searching for faces in the objects around you.
To help your kids get started, it can be useful to show them a few examples, like these.
Put your hand up if you can see the face in the bag.
OK, we can all see a face in that bag.
So this is an inanimate object that we've said looks a bit like a face.
Why do you guys think this looks like a face? What features can you see? Sara?
When looking through these images you might want to ask your kids about the common features
that make them look like faces. For example the appearance of eyes, nose or a mouth.
We're going to go outside and hunt down some faces that we see around the school.
You're all going to have cameras and we're going to take lots and lots of photos,
then bring them back here to discuss them.
Our brains are so well primed to recognise faces
that we tend to see them even when they aren't really there.
This should mean that your kids will have loads of fun finding examples of faces
around your home or perhaps down the local park.
You can use a phone or digital camera to help document any faces you find.
The more you can capture the better.
I'm going to get an idea from you guys about what you think are the important features
of a face that we were looking for.
Before you review your photos, it's a good idea to ask your kids
about which key features helped them to identify faces.
Using these suggestions you can then create a table
and use this to review each of your images,
ticking each feature off as you find them.
Eyes? - Yeah.
Mouth? - No.
Nose? - Yeah. Sort of.
Shape? - No.
How is this character feeling do you think?
Normal. - Guilty!
Right, Safwan, here is where you have to backup your point with evidence.
Why is this person guilty?
It's also worth digging a little deeper into this activity and asking your kids what
emotions they think the faces are conveying and ask them why they think that.
Once you have reviewed your photos, you should look through your table of results
to see which are the most popular features found in the images.
What feature do you think is, that is the most important?
What do you think it is?
Eyes. Put your hands up if you agree that it's the eyes.
On our tally we can see we've got 15 instances of eyes, 13 of mouth, 10 of nose.
They were the frontrunners. So we think that eyes are the most important.
And so we're really able to recognise things that look like faces.
What I'd like you to do very quickly guys, with your partner is
discuss why do you think that as humans
we are so good at recognising things like faces
and why would that be important.
Just discuss it with each other.
Using what you have learned from the investigation, it can be nice to wrap up with discussions
around why we are so good at finding faces.
For example the importance of being able to recognise friends and family.
As a fun addition to the main activity you can build on what you've learned
by printing off or drawing some cartoon eyes and
sticking them on objects around your home.
This should help reiterate how important eyes are for recognising faces.
The kids have had an absolutely brilliant time today.
If you've enjoyed this video and would like to try the activities for yourself at home
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