This morning we worked on a pretty challenging motor skill: cutting with scissors. Naturally children have a tendency to turn their wrist/hand flat while holding scissors. To help MJ remember to hold her hand/wrist in a more vertical position I drew a happy face on her thumb nail. Then, I told her while she cuts to make sure her little happy face is looking back at her. 🙂
Natural wrist/hand position for new scissor users.
If this is your first time cutting with your little it will take time and practice. Modeling good handling and cutting helps too. One of the big things I reminded MJ of was that we wanted to go slow. We cut s-l-o-w so we can cut precise. She wanted to chop, chop, chop away! A whole page can be overwhelming so I sliced the page into 3 slips. It’s formatted to easily fold into thirds so you can cut it up for your little. This printable page is available for download (FREE) at the bottom of the post.
After lots of practice together she finally started to get the hang of it. She did her best work when she went slowly. It also helped having the printable sliced into 3 slips instead of trying to cut the whole page. I highly recommend this for beginners! The last one we tried was the squiggle. It was definitely a big challenge for her and something to work toward after she’s proficient in cutting the straight line.
When we were done I let her practice cutting away at the slips of paper. She loved chopping up the paper into little bits and I didn’t mind the extra handling practice it gave her too!
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