Children are interested in scissors at a young age and begin to start testing them out. Scissor activities actually require a high level of skill in the fingers, hands, arms, shoulders and even the hips for stability. Most children are proficient with scissors by early elementary school.
When children are ready to learn, you can read about How to Teach a Child To Cut with Scissors here.
5 Ideas to Prepare Children for Scissor Activities
Here are 5 activities to prepare children for scissor use or help them to improve their scissor skills.
Puppet Play
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.
Finger Rhymes and Finger Games
Teach child finger rhymes and games to practice open and closing the fingers and stabilizing the arms.
Finger games are great to play to practice finger isolation, timing and dexterity. Try using the games as a warm up activity for scissor skills, handwriting tasks or fine motor skill practice. Here are 10 finger games to play that require no equipment or preparation.
The Fantastic Fingers® Fine Motor Program provides instruction for 60 songs and games to get the hands ready for fine motor success.
Squeezing Activities
Practice squeezing water out of small sponges, squeeze tweezers or tongs to pick up small objects or squeeze a stress ball. Play one of the Flip and Fill games to practice this skill.
Play Dough As Preparation for Scissor Activities
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.
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.
Looking for more scissor activities?
This scissor skills printable worksheets, Learn to Cut with Scissors, includes 36 pages of cutting practice pages with different animal themes to keep it fun and engaging for kids!
Flip and Snip scissor game is a fun and creative way to practice scissor skills. Add some variety to simple cutting skills with this differentiated scissor game.
