The Science of Scissor Skills

The ability to cut is an important developmental skills for children just like learning how to scribble, draw and write. If you are a parent, teacher, support staff, or an occupational therapy provider, it is important to learn more about the science of scissors skills and the developmental progression for children.

To determine how a child is progressing, professionals can use the FREE scissor skill rubric at the bottom of the post.

Learning to cut with scissors is a very complex task. Think of all the control required to actually open and close scissors. You many think just the wrist, hand and fingers does the job but in reality it is almost your entire body working to cut the paper.

You need to have appropriate posture (back stable, feet on floor and hips in neutral). Shoulders and arms need to be stable to allow the hands to work. The muscles in the fingers need to work in isolation. The eyes need to look at what the hands are doing. The brain has to process what the hands are doing on both sides of the body (one cutting and one holding the paper). Have I left any body parts out? Alright, maybe a few but in general it is a full body task just to get the hands and fingers to work with precision.

What Skills are Needed to Use Scissors?

Scissors are a fun and practical tool for people of all ages, but there’s more that goes into using them than just knowing how. Scissor use requires foundational components that children need to develop. There are many skills required to use scissors such as:

• postural stability: you need to hold your body upright and your shoulders stable to free up your hands to cut an object. It is important for children to have this stable base of support to use scissors.
• fine motor skills: you need to be able to isolate and open/close your fingers.
• hand strength – the hand muscles need to be able to hold the scissors and move along the paper without dropping them
• hand coordination/dexterity: you need to be able to smoothly open and close the scissor blades
• eye hand coordination: your eyes need to be able to follow and direct your hands where to move.
• sensory processing: your brain needs to tell you where your joints are in space in order to determine where to move them as you cut. You need to be able to touch and feel where to put the scissors on your hands.
• rhythm: cutting objects requires a certain rhythm to make smooth snips and cuts.
• bilateral coordination: your one hand needs to use the scissors while your other hands hold the paper.

WOW! That is a lot of skills necessary just to cut some paper right? When you break it down, you start to realize how complex it is.

Developmental Progression of Scissor Skills

Before learning how to teach a child to cut with scissors, it is important to know when the child should start using scissors correctly. You should not expect a young children to accomplish much with scissors but you can introduce them. Even preschoolers, will most likely not be able to cut out complex shapes. It is a tricky skill that requires lots of practice.

In general, scissor skills progress as follows:

• 2 – 2.5 years old: child snips edge of paper with scissors. May be able to use the other hand to stabilize the paper while cutting.
• 3 -3.5 years old: child cuts on line across paper. Holds and starts to turn the paper with the other hand.
• 4-5 years old: child cuts out simple shapes. Use the other hand to turn the paper fairly accurately.

Do you have students who struggle with scissor skills? Ask your pediatric occupational therapist any questions you may have to help children succeed with this skill.

If you need scissor skill worksheets, check out Learn to Cut with Scissors, includes 36 pages of cutting practice pages with different animal themes to keep it fun and engaging for kids!

How Do You Teach Scissor Skills?

Before You Start with Scissors

As discussed, scissor skills are very complex. You can start to get little hands ready with pre-scissor skills.

Here are 10 activities to help develop pre-scissor skills to get the body ready for cutting:

1. Activities that require upper extremity weight bearing – crawling over and under objects, animal walks and walking on hands.
2. Activities the encourage upper extremity muscle strengthening – monkey bars, rock climbing walls and tug of war.
3. Paper activities: Tear paper into small pieces and scrunch tissue paper into small balls.
4. Lacing activities (Try our Lacing Cards download).
5. Playing with clay – creating small balls, pull clay apart and use rolling pins. (Try Creative Clay Activities)
6. Use a hole punch or paper punches.
7. Use tweezers or tongs from the bathroom and kitchen to pick up small objects like cotton balls or dried macaroni.
8. String beads or macaroni.
9. Complete puzzles.
10. Use clothes pins to help strengthen the small muscles of the hands (Try Clothes Pin Collection).

How to Carry Scissors

To start off, you need to teach children about safety. Children need to learn to hold the scissors pointing inwards in the hands and to always walk when holding scissors. This lesson will need to be repeated over and over again for young children.

How to Hold Scissors

After they are safe simply carrying the scissors, you need to teach the children how to hold scissors. Teaching children the correct way to hold and use scissors can prevent bad habits that are difficult to correct.

Children should be taught to place the thumb in one loop and the index and middle fingers in the other loop. Another option that some children prefer is to place the thumb in one loop and the middle finger in the other loop, with the index finger stabilizing and guiding the scissors along the blade.

For both grasps, the thumb is always facing up. The ring and pinky fingers are curled into the palm.

Start Practicing with Snipping

Once the children are holding the scissors correctly, you can begin with a simple lesson of snipping paper. It is important to start with an easy task so the children feel successful. The cutting line can be darker and a thick line to provide extra visual cues.

Perhaps they can snip the edges of an index card or a recycled picture from a magazine.

Here is a simple little freebie to practice scissor snipping skills and a short line.  You can choose to use a page with the lines or without guide lines. An adult can cut apart the three strips in the dotted lines. The child can color in the flowers, smile faces and balloons. The child can snip a line from the bottom of the paper to the object.  You could also use it to practice making horizontal pre-writing strokes.

Continue Practice with Straight and Curved Lines

Once children have mastered snipping, you can progress to cutting along a straight or curved line. This 5 page black and white freebie is ready to go! These worksheets are a great way to keep the children busy while they are practicing their scissor skills.

Additional Resources to Practice Cutting Shapes

When ready, children can then move on with their scissor skills and practice cutting out shapes. They can practice cutting out circles, squares, triangles and more!

Need an idea? This circle shape craftivity can help you get started.

Practice Cutting Complex Shapes

Finally, children need to practice their scissor skills by cutting out complex shapes. Crafts are a great example of scissor skills activities.

Here is a fun, NO PREP, Color, Cut, and Glue Giraffe craft that is FREE to download from Your Therapy Source.  Practice scissors skills, fine motor skills, sequencing and more with this one page black and white freebie.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COLOR, CUT, AND GLUE GIRAFFE PROJECT HERE.

This freebie is from the Color, Cut, and Glue Complete Packet.

How Do You Describe Scissor Skills? (otherwise known as progress monitoring)

If you are a teacher or occupational therapy provider, you made need to describe a student’s scissor skills and how they are progressing. There are many different way to monitor progress from simple to complex.

If you want to get more detailed, below is a scissor skill rubric that you can download for free.

Rubrics are informal assessment tools used to evaluate an individual’s ability to complete a task. They provide a scoring guide to judge performance on a specific task. Each skill is broken down into different components and a numerical value is given to each component. The performance is then scored by totaling the sum of the numerical values. By using the rubric, everyone can be scored based on the same criteria. In addition, rubrics help inform the individual of what is expected of them to complete the task. This encourages feedback and self-assessment on the task.

What is Measured with the Scissor Skills Rubric?

This rubric is broken down into 6 tasks:

1. Holding Scissors
2. Helper Hand Use
3. Snipping
4. Straight Lines
5. Curved Lines
6. Shapes

This rubric is meant to track progress. The best possible score is a 30 (scoring 5 points for each of the 6 tasks).

Depending on the child’s age, a child may not score a 30 in order to have proficient scissor skills. Around 6.5 years and later, the child should score at or close to the total score of 30. If you alter the rubric by adding or deleting descriptors, make sure you adjust the overall total score. If you are expecting others to score the rubric, remember to train the scorer to help increase reliability.

Get your FREE Scissor Skills Rubric Here

If you want more rubrics, this Rubrics and Checklists for Pediatric Occupational and Physical Therapy bundle helps therapists to streamline assessments and data collection making it faster, easier, and more reliable than subjective data.

Sign up to receive the weekly email newsletter and other announcements from Your Therapy Source. You will be redirected to your download. If you can not view the sign-up box send us an email and we will send you the freebie. Please reference this Scissor Skill freebie.