Tamarin Monkey Masks

This week, I've been teaching the kids about the monkeys that live in the Amazon rainforest. Yesterday's monkey was the Emperor Tamarin. These are the ones with the white mustaches! (If you don't know what I'm talking about, do a quick google image search. Better yet, I'll do it for you. Click here!) I thought it would be fun for the kids to make a monkey mask, so I found a coloring page of a tamarin (here), cropped it so it was mainly just the head, printed it out, then traced it onto a plain piece of paper using a Sharpie. This way I got a clearer picture and didn't have to worry about the background. I also didn't trace the long mustache. The kids would be adding it later. Then I printed them out on white card stock so they'd be sturdy.

They used oil pastels to color the picture.

I cut up pieces of white curling ribbon and the kids glued them onto the cheeks of the monkey. They used a glue stick and put one end of the ribbon into the glue and pressed down.

They could use as many pieces of ribbon as they wanted, but most used 3 or 4 on each check. I didn't curl the ribbon with a scissors because I thought that would be too much, so I left the natural curl.

Obviously, I made them too long. I ended up trimming them quite a bit. Once the glue was dry, I cut the face out, cut the eyes out and attached elastic string in the back from ear to ear.

I love how they turned out. And the kids loved wearing them...

even though the eye holes didn't quite match up!

Fun Fact: The Emperor tamarin is thought to be named after German Emperor Wilhelm II, due to the long mustache. It apparently started as a joke, but the name stuck.