Teaching Children How to Cut Using Scissors

Teaching your child how to cut using scissors can be easy if you use the following tips.

If they don’t get it at the beginning, be patient and help guide them to prevent them from getting discouraged.

Teaching a child how to cut can be an exciting process that contributes to the development of their fine motor skills.

The main objective is for your child to develop the movements that allow them to use their fingers, hand and eyes in a coordinated manner.

Cutting with scissors can strengthen their hand muscles. It also stimulates the skills needed to handle other utensils in the future.

By learning to use scissors, children will also be preparing to use other utensils such as pencils, buttons or knives.

The action of cutting also promotes hand-eye coordination. Vision allows the child to recognize the shape and it orients the hands to make the necessary movements.

Cutting also requires asymmetric and synchronized coordination with both hands. The child uses one hand to hold the scissors and the other hand to hold what they’re cutting.

As a mother, you must help them learn while being patient. Your child will need time to learn how to use scissors properly.

4 tips to teach your child how to cut

In order to make the task less expensive, there are some tips that can help them acquire the skill of using scissors quickly.

Here are 4 tips to teach your child how to cut:

1. Choose suitable scissors

It’s important for your child to use scissors that are appropriate for their little hands. You should pick simple scissors that have plastic sheets which only allow them to cut paper.

The scissors should also have round tips to ensure the child’s safety.

If the child’s hands aren’t big enough to open and close the scissors that means they’re still too small to start learning how to cut.

If the child is left handed, you should try to get left-handed scissors as it will make the process a bit more simple

Keep all of this in mind when looking for suitable scissors for your child.

2. Learn to open and close the scissors

The first thing your child needs to learn when using scissors is how to manipulate them to open and close with one hand.

Initially, this gesture will be complicated for the child. They might start learning by using both hands.

You can try a few exercises for your child to get used to their first scissors by performing opening and closing movements.

A good start would be to practice with their hands only, then they can try with the scissors.

3. Develop precision

When your child is comfortable enough with the scissors to master the basic movements, you can begin to develop the child’s precision with simple activities.

A good example of a simple activity is to put a sticker in the middle of a sheet of paper and have the little one slide their scissors toward it.

You can also draw a line on a piece of paper and ask your child to cut along it.

You can increase the width of the line and the difficulty gradually according to the child’s capabilities with the scissors.

Try to use simple precision exercises at the beginning in order to motivate their learning process.

4. Developing control

When your child can cut straight lines and has control over the scissors, that means they’re ready to cut several shapes. They can start to draw squares, rectangles and circles of sheets of paper.

At first, they might have a lot of difficulty cutting circles since they have problems changing directions.

If they have difficulty cutting triangles, you can show them how to stop at the corner and then turn the blade in another direction so they can continue cutting.

Once the child has control over the scissors, they’ll be able to easily move around the contours of objects and the silhouettes of their favorite characters.

Lastly, it’s important that while teaching your child to cut, you allow them to experiment individually.

Although they might occasionally suffer from a minor cut, you should let them improve their skills through experience.