Eye Hand Coordination, Fine Motor Skills, Functional Skills, Occupational Therapy, Visual Motor Skills

Easy Scissor Practice

Colleen Beck OTR/L

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is a pediatric occupational therapist and the owner and author of The OT Toolbox website. She manages all of The OT Toolbox social media accounts and runs the popular newsletter. Colleen created The OT Toolbox in 2011 and since then has written thousands of blog posts designed to support therapy providers, educators, parents, counselors, admin, and caregivers in promoting the healthy development of kids. Check out Colleen's blog posts below:

by Colleen Beck OTR/L
December 9, 2014

Working on scissor skills can be tough for some kids! There’s a lot that goes into cutting a shape from a piece of paper. The grasping of the scissors, opening and closing the loops, holding and manipulating the paper, keeping the scissors on the line, maintaining endurance to keep on snipping…it can be a difficult task for little ones with hand weakness or difficulty with any of these parts of the scissor task.

Cutting streamers is an inexpensive way to teach kids to snip paper.

Try these bilateral coordination activities to work on efficient use of the hands together in scissor activities.

This scissor practice activity is great for kids who are just starting out with scissor use or kids who need a little practice with managing scissors.

In-hand manipulation activities are a great way to boost fine motor skills needed for tasks like managing clothing fasteners, using a pencil when writing, manipulating items like coins or beads, and more.

Practice scissor skills with a roll of crepe paper for an easy scissor activity.

Easy way to practice cutting with scissors:

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We started this easy activity with just a few items. A roll of crepe paper streamer and a pair of scissors are all that you need for this easy scissor activity. I love Fiskars Blunt Tip Kid Scissors for new scissor users, but you can see more scissor options here.

Kids will love this easy scissor skills practice activity using crepe paper streamers!

I pulled out a handful of scissor colors for my son, just to make it fun for him. He’s a little reluctant with cutting, only because he needs more practice and he’s just not into it. Activities like this are a good way to get him interested in practicing the skills needed for accuracy with cutting shapes.

Practice Scissor Skills with Kids using Streamers!

I had my son snip the streamer into snips. He first cut the whole way across the width of the streamer so we had a ton of little pieces. Don’t worry about the mess. Picking up the shreds is a good fine motor work out too. Have your child grab up those pieces of streamer and tuck them into their hands, one at a time.

When they hold a few pieces in their palm as they gather up more little pieces using the pointer finger and thumb practices in-hand manipulation and the process of translation. Manipulating items like this from the tips of the fingers into the palm is a good way to encourage dexterity of the hands and intrinsic muscle strength.

Related Read: Use this scented scissor skills activity to help kids learn graded scissor use in a fun way!

After he cut the width of the streamer, I had him snip only half way across the width of the streamer. This made a fringe the length of the crepe paper.

Cutting only half way encourages motor planning and controlled movements of the scissors. What a great way to practice opening and closing those scissor blades with control.

Managing the streamer with the assisting hand requires bilateral hand coordination to hold the streamer and move the fingers along as he continued snipping.

To make this task even more difficult, have the child cut the length of the streamer. Cutting a longer distance requires endurance of the hand muscles and controlled motor planning to manipulate the streamer with the helper hand as the child snips down the center of the streamer. Older kids who need to work on eye-hand coordination would benefit from this task.

Unfortunately, the images of the process of cutting didn’t make the cut (see what I did there??) with fuzzy pictures. I wouldn’t want to hurt your eyes with my bad photography skills. We’ll be doing this task again with my Little Guy so I’m hoping to catch a few images and add them at some point. Let us know if you try this activity with your child!