Cut it out!: Activities to develop kids' scissor skills!

Scissor skills are such an important skill for kids to have, especially those entering into Pre-K and Kindergarten. For very young children, you will want to strengthen their hand muscles first with fine motor activities such as playdoh or coloring well before you introduce the use of scissors. We have included some great activities for helping improve on cutting skills for those kids who are brand new to it or who could just use some more practice (which is most early elementary aged kids). Click on the title of any of the pictures to be linked to the Instagram post as well. *Scissors can be dangerous, even when using kid scissors. Please provide direct supervision when working on any of the cutting activities listed below.*

One good cutting trick for kids is to tape down the end of the paper to the table and leave the paper hanging over the edge. This helps them keep the paper sturdy and tends to help keep their non-cutting hand out of the way. Draw a dotted line on the paper for your child to cut on. You can keep the line you draw straight or add a bit of a challenge and do a zig zag or wavy line.

For this activity, pick any letter, number, sight word, etc that your child is working on. Write it multiple times on different color paper. Divide a large piece of white paper into sections so that each color you used has it's own spot. As your child cuts out the different letter/word they will come over and lay it in the correct area. Ex: all the blue N's will go in the blue section, the orange N's in the orange section, and so on. They can just lay them there or glue them down, up to you. Again, this activity uses the trick of taping the paper to the table which can really help those little hands working on cutting.

This project was originally done at Halloween time but can easily be changed from a witch to just a regular person so it can be used at other times of the year. Take a piece of cardboard and draw a face on it, then cut it out. Poke a couple of holes along where the hairline would be of the face you drew. Push some yarn through the hole and tie a knot on the back side. Give your child some kid's scissors and let them give the "person" you drew a haircut. This is a fairly simple one to set up and so much fun too!

Here is another variation of the witch haircut but you will hot glue the yarn onto a small pumpkin and add a festive hat. This will for sure be a hit at Halloween with your kids!

For this activity you will need cups, painters tape, counting bears (or other small trinkets), and circle stickers. Put a piece of tape across the top of the cup. Write a number on the tape or circle sticker. Do this for multiple cups keeping the number fairly small like 1-5. Have your child count out the number of bears that is shown on the sticker and try and balance that many bears (or trinkets) on the piece of tape. Once they have done that they get to do the really fun part... cut the piece of tape and let the bears fall into the cup!

Take a strip of paper and draw a dashed line down the middle. On one side of the line write random letters. Have your child cut until they reach the letter you tell them to stop at (it can be any letter you choose). This helps them work on cutting skills but also a little bit of letter recognition since they need to watch and stop at the letter you chose. For an added challenge you could make the line zig zag or use sight words or numbers.

This is the perfect EASY activity to get out when your kids need something to do, or maybe a little afternoon reset if everyone is getting a bit grumpy. Fill the cutting bin with random things you think your child would enjoy cutting.... wrapping paper scraps, junk mail, bubble wrap, used post its, etc and pull it out with some kid safety scissors and you're ready to go! Tip: keep a small bin/box near your recycling bin in your house. Before you toss something in there decide if it might be good for the cutting bin and put it in the cutting bin instead. By doing this you don't have to prep the cutting bin, it will just be ready to go when you are!

Here are some of Stay at Home Activity Mom's favorite scissors to use: