Recommended Age: 2 and 1/5 years and onwards
Purpose: building manual dexterity in the child’s fingers and wrist. Through progressing through cutting strips as they increase in complexity, the child also builds their cutting skills, working towards being able to cut accurately.
Level of Parent Involvement: Medium during initial presentation and setting up the activity then low once the child can work independently
Prerequisites
- none
Materials
- Scissors (child sized)
- Basket or tray to carry scissors and paper on
- Construction paper of different colours
- Cutting strips
- Papers a child can make his/her own lines on and cut
At Home Presentation
Preparation
- Cut some strips from the template
- Arrange materials on a tray or in a basket
Steps
- Invite the child telling them “today I am going to show you how to do some cutting”
- The child may bring the tray/basket to the table, invite the child to sit down and sit to her right
- Take the paper strip and the scissors out of the tray and place on the table
- Show the child how to pick up the scissors by placing your index and middle fingers through the large hole on the bottom and your thumb through the smaller hole on the top (your thumb should be pointing to the ceiling)
- Pick up the cutting strip with the other hand
- Open the scissors by widening your grip, placing the piece of paper in the now open scissors, lining the scissor blades up with the line
- Close scissors in one snip, cutting the piece of paper on the line
- The cut pieces of paper may be placed in a container or used for pasting
- Invite the child to get a strip of paper and practice cutting
- When the child is finished come back and give the child the above options as to what they would like to do with their cut pieces of paper
- When the child returns the tray let them know they are now free to explore the other variations of cutting (zig zags, shapes, lines closer together etc)
Variations
- The child practices 2 snip cutting using a strip with a zig zag line
- Child may practice cutting out shapes from paper, print or draw some basic shapes (circle, square, triangle) on a small piece of paper and invite the child to cut them out
Note
- Provide the child with a small box or container to put the cut pieces of paper and show the child how to use them for pasting or to make a collage rather than wasting the paper
