Animal headbands, masks and more.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me, is how much kids love masks. I’m not talking about the kind we were all wearing through the ‘rough periods’. I’m referring to animals, super hero’s and any number of other characters.

Whilst teaching animal vocabulary to one of my classes, I decided to put my printer to good use. I made up some animal headbands and printed them to use as props in class. That started me on a headband and mask bonanza, as that first class had kids scrambling to get whatever headband they could get their hands on.

Since then, Ive found myself printing masks and headbands at least once a week for either vocabulary or a story. Animals are of course the coolest, but even headbands for teaching firefighting vocabulary, professions, Halloween and many others are so easy to make and require very little prep.

I typically print 2-3 of the the same mask, unless they are all the same mask. As an example we were learning a story about a giraffe, which I printed a giraffe mask for all of my students. It makes it a lot easier to cut. As you can cut 4-5 pieces of paper together. That combined with a stapler makes prepping them about 7 minutes.

I purely use these as a teaching tool so the kids enjoy the lessons more. You could turn them into a craft activity and have the kids colour them in or cut them out themselves. But I find just using them as props during your teaching creates a very energetic and engaged class. The students simply love them. It takes me 3 minutes to stop and staple one together on each students head and them I continue the lesson. They are fantastic for roleplay as well.

Don’t think that kindergarten is a cu-off age for these either. At one of our training centers we were teaching animal elements (fur, wings, beak, teeth, scales fins etc) to 9 year old students. I printed out a small photo of the corresponding animal to give to a student standing in front of the class. The class could ask questions to try and guess the animal. Such as: Does it have fur? Does it live in the ocean? etc. The student in front of the class could only answer yes or no. The winner who guessed the animal and the person in front answering both got a matching headband/crown (monkey, shark etc). It was a surprise. The moment the other students realised they could get a headband, every hand went in the air to participate. It was fantastic.

All of the animal masks and headbands are available for free download here:

You must be logged in to download, however they are completely free. I won’t spam you with emails. I purely want to encourage people to join and leave a comment. You don’t even have to use your real email address, you can google ‘onetimeemail’ and use a temporary one. I only ask you leave a comment, let me know what you are using them for or any other ideas I can add to them or make them better.

I will post more of these headbands and masks later that relate to other activities. You may want to sign up anyway. Ill be posting a lot of cool stuff to download.

See you soon,

Shannon