5 Activities to PREPARE Children for Scissor Use

Children are interested in scissors at a young age and begin to start testing them out.  Scissor use actually requires a high level of skill in the fingers, hands, arms, shoulders and even the hips for stability (read more on that here).  Most children are proficient with scissors by early elementary school.  Here are 5 activities to prepare children for scissor use or help them to improve their scissor skills:

1. Puppets:  Grab some hand puppets or make some.  Children can practice opening and closing the puppet’s mouth which is similar to the skills of opening and closing scissors.
2. Finger Rhymes:  Teach child finger rhymes to practice open and closing the fingers and stabilizing the arms.  The Fantastic Fingers® Fine Motor Program provides instruction for 60 songs and games to get the hands ready for fine motor success.
3. Squeezing Activities: Practice squeezing water out of small sponges, squeeze tweezers or tongs to pick up small objects or squeeze a stress ball.
4. Play Dough:  Squish, roll, squeeze and pinch play dough for open ended, hand strengthening fun!  If the child is low tone or has decreased muscle strength in the hands, check out The Hand Strengthening Handbook for more ideas.
5. Bilateral coordination activities:  Perform activities where one hand is stabilizing while the other hand is moving – activities such as using a fishing rod, using a hand mixer, stirring ingredients in a recipe, hammering a golf tee into Styrofoam, etc.

On May 1st, the Functional Skills for Kids team will be launching The Scissors Book.  This book was written by the same team that brought you The Handwriting Book.  For this week, you can get a FREE printable packet of cutting practice sheets: 17 pages of Cut and Paste Puzzles, 7 pages of Scissor Cutting Strips and printable template of a Scissor Skills Puppet Craft.

 

Looking for more scissor activities?  Here is a collection of three activity downloads for scissor practice.

1.  Cut, Create and Play Reproducible Scissor Activities for Children includes (40 pages) of 23 scissor and fine motor activities for young children. Each of these activities are ready to go.  Just print, copy, cut and create craft projects and games to play.  The activities promote the development of scissor, fine motor and visual skills by encouraging practice with cutting snips, 1″ – 3″ lines, paper in half, straight lines, rectangles, squares, angles, curves and circles.
2. Cut and Fold – This download is great to encourage fine motor skills while creating fun puppets, games, stationery and more. Children will love the simple cuts and folds to create the toys.  Available in color and black and white.
3. Tangrams for Kids – Tangrams are chinese puzzles that consists of 7 pieces of a square. The children can cut and arrange the 7 pieces to match the pictures. Included in the download are 10 tangram puzzles to cut and piece together with 3 levels (easy, medium and hard).

Regular retail price for these three titles is $14.97.  When you purchase the bundle the 30% off sale price is only $10.47!

Order the Scissor Skills Bundle.

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