A delicious way to teach emotions

Ethan’s favourite cookies are the gingerbread faces I make. He is very interested in emotions and facial expressions of late. Not usually an area of interest for a child with autism! – so I am harnessing that interest as much as I can! We have puzzles that focus on facial expressions, we talk about facial expressions and gestures and what the person might be feeling, we have dvds that show emotional expressions. We play games where we pretend to be happy, sad, surprised, scared, angry, tired etc which Ethan loves – both guessing the emotion and playing out the emotion himself.
Ethan has the tendency to get an idea or concept in his brain and then forever more that particular idea/ representation is set in stone – no flexibility tolerated! For example in Ethan’s mind, if someone has their arms crossed then they are angry. I am not sure where that association initially came from, maybe once when I was pretending to be angry (or was angry for real!!), I crossed my arms and did an angry face. Now if anyone ever has their arms crossed to Ethan they are “angwy”. Even if they are smiling and their face indicates happiness. He will insist they are angry even if I point out that their mouth is smiling, their eyebrows are not furrowed, they look happy etc. So we have been working on the different expressions and trying to change any of these fixations he has about how emotion is expressed physically.
So, one of my “tools” are these cookies. A delicious way to continue reinforcing the concept of emotions and hopefully creating flexibility in his mind about how emotion is expressed!