DEVELOPING SCISSOR SKILLS
Practicing scissors skills is an excellent way to have fun and improve eye-hand coordination at the same time with your 2- or 3-year old.
Pre-Scissor Skills - 2 1/2 years or younger
Begin with fun "pre-scissor" activities that strengthen muscles for cutting and begin to refine eye-hand coordination necessary for accurate cutting:
- Use tongs or children's chopsticks to pick up cotton balls from around the room and put them in a bowl or bucket
- Use a squirt bottle to squirt water on the plants outside or "wash" outdoor toys
- Roll dough into a long "snake" and cut it with scissors that have plastic blades
Scissor Skills - 3 years up
The next step is to begin with children's scissors with rounded-tip blades. Make sure they are sharp enough to cut easily. We recommend the Fiskars or Koopy brands of scissors. Help your child get comfortable holding the scissors properly:
- Thumb in the small hole and at least 3 fingers in the bigger hole
- Always hold the thumb up toward the ceiling both in the cutting hand and the hand holding the paper.
- Have your child sit in a chair with his/her feet flat on the floor/stool and have the chair backed away from the table.
- Elbows stay at the child's sides during cutting -- "no chicken wings."
- Hold the paper with the non-dominant hand during cutting.
Now it is time to start "snipping." A great resource is NAPPA (National Parenting Publications Awards) 2010 Gold Winner, Snip It™, can assist to get started:
- Cut a strip of paper that is only ½-inch wide and help your child "snip" pieces off and complete the peel and stick pictures in the front of the book. For an added fun step, draw a larger shape on a piece of paper (heart, house, face, etc.) and use a glue stick to make it sticky. Let your child stick his/her "snips" of paper to the shape and hang it up for everyone to see!
- Your child can also snip ribbons or yarn into smaller pieces and use them to make a collage or make shapes when glued on paper.
Don't worry if, at first, you still have to help your child open and shut the scissors.
Cutting Skills
After your child is good at random snipping, start giving a thick (¼-inch) line to aim for (but keep the piece of paper narrow). Then you can "cut the railroad track" or use the squares that are snipped off to "build" designs on a piece of paper.
As accuracy improves, make the line longer so your child has to make 2 snips to get across it. You may have to go back to helping hand-over-hand at this point.
As you start making the lines longer, start adding curves, saying, "Drive your car (the scissors) on the road." Once your child is good at lines, start with simple shapes. The next two stages of Snip It™ have bold-lined shapes to practice cutting to make even more pictures.
More fun activities for this stage:
- Cut out 5-6 shapes to form a house, car, or flower, then glue the pieces to another piece of paper.
- Cut out coupons, pictures from catalogs, or advertisements.
- Cut out shapes from different materials (cardstock, tissue paper, sandpaper, cloth, etc).
For the last challenge, make the line the child cuts on more and more narrow. By the age of 7, a child should be pretty accurate when cutting on 1/32-inch line (width of line drawn with a pen).
Happy cutting!
Toni M. Schulken
MS, OTR/L