This cupcake liner butterfly is a scissor skills craft to build fine motor skills and scissor skills. Use this cupcake liner craft in therapy with a butterfly theme or in Spring occupational therapy activities. Spring is here (whether the weather agrees or not!) and this butterfly craft is a fun way to celebrate! With how easy this cupcake liner butterfly craft is, we’ll be sure to make a few batches of these all summer long.
How to make a Cupcake Liner Butterfly
You’ll need a few materials for this craft:
Bright cupcake liners (I love the colors in this set!)
To make the butterfly craft, follow these directions:
Cut the cupcake liners like the picture above. Kids can work on their scissor skills by cutting a material like a cupcake liner. It’s a lighter weight material than regular paper and a great way to address line accuracy and scissor control.
Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!
Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
We live in an area with cold winters and lots of snow. With the wintery weather comes ice, salt, and snow plows. We’ve been watching many salt trucks rumble down our road, scattering salt and plowing snow. My kids love to see the salt truck come and every time the see one when we’re out and about, they shout, “SNOW PLOW” from the back of the minivan. We had to make an Easy Shapes Salt Truck craft to join our other truck crafts.
Other trucks and cars crafts that work on scissor skills with simple geomteric shapes include:
If working on scissor skills is a must, then this salt truck craft is the way to go. Kiddos that love all things trucks and vehicles will love it for the vehicle theme, but as a therapist, I see the geometric shapes, making it perfect for working on early scissor skills.
Salt Truck Craft
This post contains affiliate links.
To make the craft, you’ll need just a few materials:
Scissors
Yellow paper
Red paper
Black paper
White paper
Green paper
Glue
Other colors of paper can certainly be used! These are the colors we used, and I’ll describe the shapes you need for this truck craft here so you can use the salt truck as a template.
About paper type- Different types of paper provides different amounts of feedback for young scissor users. We love crafting with card stock or thicker paper, because it’s easy to hold with the assisting hand and the paper doesn’t easily bend or move when cutting through it with scissors. Cardstock paper is great for younger kids or those just learning to snip and cut with smooth lines as well as just starting with turning the scissors around a corner of simple shapes.. Its brightly colors make great crafting material and the thickness is perfect for new scissor users. You can find more information on types of paper for scissor skill development in our scissor skills crash course.
You’ll need to draw the following shapes:
Yellow Rectangle- for the body of the truck
Yellow Square- for the cab of the truck
White Smaller Square- for the window of the truck
Large Green triangle- for the truck’s Salt bed
Long Green rectangle- for the top of the salt truck’s bed
2 Black larger circles- for the wheels
2 Smaller white circles- for inside the wheels
Red Half Circle- for the plow
Small Red Square- for the plow attachment
Draw the shapes onto the paper and then start cutting. Cut shapes as pictured above to build the salt truck craft.
Snow Plow Puzzle
Constructing this snow plow puzzle is part of the fun! Kids can work on visual memory by building the truck from memory or by looking at an example picture and then back to their project.
You can build the salt truck with them and then deconstruct the truck. Ask your child to recreate the truck from memory, using their mind’s eye to recall the placement of the shapes. This memory is visual memory and an important skill for copying work when handwriting.
There are other visual perceptual skills at work, too.
Looking for specific pieces that are placed on the table surface is a challenge in visual scanning, visual discrimination, figure-ground, and form constancy.
Remembering the position of the shapes is part of visual discrimination, a skill needed when children need to remember subtle differences in a picture or written work. Difficulty with visual discrimination will be apparent when a child has difficulty discerning between b, d, p, or q.
Early scissor skills fine motor
For more ways to work on scissor skills, along with all of the fine motor skills needed for scissor use and handwriting, try the Winter Fine Motor Kit. It’s loaded with cutting activities, lacing cards, coloring, clip activities, fine motor art, and fun ways to help children develop pre-writing hand strength, dexterity, and motor skills.
Use the fine motor activities, lacing cards, toothpick art, and crafts in the Winter Fine Motor Kit. It’s a 100 page packet with all winter themes, and you’ll find penguins there!
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
This pumpkin craft is a fun way to build fine motor skills and to use recycled materials at the same time. This cute pumpkin craft was actually designed, created, and photographed by my daughters! I love to see them doing what they love: creating homemade crafts while fostering occupational balance and helping others build skills by sharing such a fun Fall craft.
Pumpkin Fine Motor Activity
By making this mini pumpkin craft, kids can build many fine motor skills. It’s a pumpkin fine motor activity without the goopy mess of pumpkin guts and seeds!
This is a great Halloween occupational therapy activity to add to your toolbox…Just by making this Halloween craft, kids can build dexterity, refined grasp, and precision. Let’s break down how this craft builds fine motor skills:
Precision– The pumpkin craft is a miniature pumpkin, just sized right for a bottle cap. Working on a small scale, kids can work on precision of grasp as they pick up and manipulate the materials.
Pincer grasp- In fact, that tip to tip grasp that uses the pads of the pointer finger and they thumb, pincer grasp is used. This refined grasp is needed to pick up the googly eyes, pinch and place tape, maneuver the pipe cleaner piece.
Neat pincer grasp– When that pincer grasp requires even more precision and the tips of the pointer finger and the thumb bend at the last joint, a neat pincer grasp is used. This grasp is needed to pick up very small items such as a mini-jack-o-lantern eyes and cutouts.
Separation of the sides of the hand– Manipulating tape, picking up small items, and cutting with scissors fosters the fine motor skill of separation of the sides of the hand. This skill is essential for a functional pencil grasp.
Bilateral coordination– Pulling and ripping tape is a great bilateral coordination task. Kids can use coordinated use of both hands throughout this pumpkin craft activity. Working on a small scale in a craft like this one pulls concentrated near-point work at the midline, making it a nice pre-cursor activity to refine skills needed for reading, writing, and other tasks requiring fine motor coordination skills.
Gross grasp– Hand strength is built through the power side of the hand, or the ulnar side. When the power side is strengthened through gross grasp activities like squeezing a glue bottle, kids can gain more stability in the hand as they complete fine motor tasks. Squeezing the glue bottle in a small space requires a refined grasp, so glue is stopped when appropriate and there isn’t a giant pool of glue all over the table. This ability to squeeze a glue bottle in a small spot with accuracy isn’t easy for some kiddos! Here is more information on gross grasp.
Scissor skills– This fine motor Halloween activity has very small scissor work, making it a nice way to work on precision and graded scissor skills.
Let’s make a Cute Pumpkin Craft for Kids!
First step is to gather all of your materials. Your materials for this pumpkin craft are: (Amazon affiliate links included below)
Let’s get started with making this cutie mini pumpkin craft.
First, cut the pipe cleaners to a length of about one inch. Put the pipe cleaners on the edge of one bottlecap. When you have it in a good spot add orange tape on the sides so it will stick.
2. Place the second bottle cap on the edge of the first bottle cap so the rims are touching and sandwiching the pipe cleaners. Add a strip of orange tape around the outside of both bottle caps for a 3D pumpkin craft!
3. Cut a small piece of the green pipe cleaner and bend it into a leaf shape.
4. Then cut out your black construction paper to make a small jack-o-lantern face.
5. Next, glue the small construction paper pieces in the position you would like it to be on one of the bottle caps.
Have fun building fine motor skills with this mini pumpkin craft!
Grab the Pumpkin Fine Motor Kit for more coloring, cutting, and eye-hand coordination activities with a Pumpkin theme! It includes:
7 digital products that can be used any time of year- has a “pumpkins” theme
5 pumpkin scissor skills cutting strips
Pumpkin scissor skills shapes- use in sensory bins, math, sorting, pattern activities
2 pumpkin visual perception mazes with writing activity
Pumpkin “I Spy” sheet – color in the outline shapes to build pencil control and fine motor strength
Pumpkin Lacing cards – print, color, and hole punch to build bilateral coordination skills
2 Pumpkin theme handwriting pages – single and double rule bold lined paper for handwriting practice
Work on underlying fine motor and visual motor integration skills so you can help students excel in handwriting, learning, and motor skill development.
We loved making this mini pumpkin craft for building precision and neat pincer grasp. By cutting the mini pumpkin faces from paper, you really work on refined motor skills.
You can expand this activity by pairing it with our pumpkin emotions activity. Ask the child/student to identify emotions and then make that pumpkin face with the tiny pumpkins.
Or, include more self-regulation concepts by using the tiny pumpkins along with our free pumpkin deep breathing exercise. Trace the deep breathing arrows with the tiny pumpkins! You can even discuss how small changes (and mini pumpkins!) make a big difference.
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
Teaching kids to cut with scissors depends a lot on the type of scissors that are used. Ask any pediatric occupational therapist, and you will find recommendations for kid-friendly scissors that actually allow kids to cut paper. You know…the training scissors to introduce kids to scissor skills…the ones that don’t just tear through paper.
Choosing the best scissors for kids
When it comes to finding the best scissors for kids, there is a lot more to it than you might think. Cutting scissors need to fit the child’s hand and feel comfortable. They need to be safe and allow the child to learn to manipulate the scissors while cutting paper (and nothing else). They need to have molded handles that are easy to hold in the correct position. And they need to grow with the child so they can progress from cutting snips to shapes and multi-angled forms.
Teaching kids to cut with scissors is a progress. There are tips that can help along the way and there are strategies that can help a child succeed.
Having scissors and a strategy can help!
Why is cutting with scissors important?
When we teach kids the correct way to hold scissors, kids find so much more success in cutting shapes. You probably have seen the child that holds scissors sideways on the paper. They open and close the scissor blades but nothing happens.
Maybe you’ve seen the child that pushes the scissors through the paper. They tear and rip the page instead of cutting along the lines.
You might recall the child that holds the scissors with their elbow out and up in the air so they are cutting in toward their body instead of out and along the lines.
All of these positioning tactics lead to poor scissor skills and a frustrated kiddo.
Importance of Scissor Skills
When we show kids how to properly hold scissors we set them up for success. When we hand scissors that properly fit the child, we are providing the tools for accuracy.
Teaching kids to hold the scissors correctly allows them to position correctly so they can cut along the lines and feel success as they cut shapes.
When kids open and close the scissor blades, they gain precision of fine motor skills. And, those same fine motor skills allow the child to gain accuracy in cutting more complex shapes and forms.
Cutting with scissors builds bilateral coordination skills so they can use both hands together in a coordinated manner.
Cutting along lines offers a way to gain accuracy and precision in eye-hand coordination skills.
Not only are kids gaining developmental motor skills, they are completing a functional task, too. Teaching kids the proper way to hold scissors allows them to open and close the blades to cut along the lines with accuracy. They can snip the paper rather than tear. They can progress in scissor skill development from showing an interest in cutting with scissors to cutting complex shapes.
So how to teach kids the right positioning for cutting with scissors?
Positioning for scissor skills
First in addressing positioning for scissor skills is sitting posture. Make sure the child is seated at a desk or table with their feet flat on the floor and arms at a functional position. Using a table that is too high puts the elbows and shoulders into too much flexion.
Tuck the elbows into the sides. Many times, we see new scissor users holding their elbows way out to the sides as they attempt to bring the scissor work closer to their face and body. Actually, having the child tuck their elbows into their side offers more support so they can work on refining those fine motor skills.
Make sure the scissors are positioned on the hand correctly. Kids often times, place their thumb in the small loop of the scissor handles and push all of their other fingers into the larger hole. If possible, ensure that the thumb is in the smaller loop and the middle finger is placed in the larger loop with the ring ginger and pinkie finger tucked into the palm for support.
If that positioning isn’t possible, allow the child to use their middle, ring, and pinkie fingers in the larger loop.
Be sure that the scissors are positioned perpendicular to the paper. When the scissors tilt sideways due to upper body positioning, the paper tends to tear rather than cut.
All of these tips, and much more are available in The Scissor Skills Book, created by an occupational therapist and physical therapist team that covers all things development and motor skills needed for cutting with scissors.
Scissor Skills Curriculum
So, if working on scissor skills, positioning, and building scissor accuracy is something you are working on with kids, then you are going to love this item!
This scissor book offers step by step strategies to support development of scissor skills. It’s a therapist’s look at scissor skills curriculum using a developmental approach to help with positioning the scissors so kids can cut along lin
Elmer the patchwork elephant looks different than his friends. Through stories and colorful pictures that depict everyday elephant life, Elmer the elephant teaches us about diversity and differences. Elmer teaches us about acceptance, friendship, and empathy. Check out the Elmer the Elephant activity below that builds a baseline for these important skills, but also helps kids with fine motor skills, visual perceptual skills, and visual motor skills.
If you love the Elmer books as much as we do, then you will adore this Elmer the Elephant activity. We LOVE Elmer the Elephant…and all of the Elmer books. Every time we go to the library, we are sure to check the shelf for a new Elmer book that we may have missed. This week’s book activity was so much fun to do with the kids, because it involved one of our favorite books (ever) and a great visual perception activity. Add this book activity to your list of crafts based on children’s books that build skills through reading.
Elmer the Elephant Activity
This fine motor craft is a powerful one because it not only builds essential visual perceptual, visual motor, and fine motor skills, but it teaches as well. This Elmer the elephant activity can be used to illustrate differences, empathy, and friendship. Here are more books that teach empathy and friendship that can be used in therapy sessions or in the classroom or home.
They loved creating and building our very own Elmer craft. Elmer’s colors made for a great way to help kids build fine motor skills and visual motor skills, too. I loved throwing in the scissor work portion of the activity and working on a few important skills. My youngest daughter worked on her color identification and sorting. The colors in Elmer’s patchwork skin are perfect for Toddlers to practice naming colors. Little Guy was loving the puzzle-building portion of our activity. The lines were a great way to work on a few visual perceptual skills needed for handwriting.
Elmer the Patchwork Elephant Activity
This post contains affiliate links.
If you haven’t read Elmer by David McKee, this is definitely a book you need to check out. Elmer is a patchwork elephant with many colors. He sticks out from the crowd of gray elephants. By exploring and interacting with his community of elephants, Elmer and the other elephants learn to accept and value his unique characteristics. Elmer is not only a colorful patchwork elephant. He is funny, smart, caring, and an individual. The book teaches us to accept differences because those differences are what make us who we are.
Elmer teaches us about diversity. He teaches us about identity and tolerance. We all have different colors, shapes, interests, abilities, talents, and ideas. Those differences are what make us special. Let’s see those differences, accept them, and celebrate them!
We made our own patchwork elephant with lots of colors and had a great time building and creating while talking about color names. This was such a great activity for both Little Guy and Baby Girl.
We started with Foam Sheets in lots of different colors. You might have seen our color sorting scissor activity post where we practiced our scissor skills. These squares came in handy for this Elmer activity.
I found a picture frame at the Dollar Store that has an acrylic front, instead of glass. This is a great writing surface using a white board marker. I drew an outline of Elmer with the marker. We had a little bowl of water and started sticking the foam squares onto the surface to build our Elmer. When the foam pieces are dunked into water, they stick really well to the picture frame surface. We did a version of this way back when our blog began with our rainbow building activity.
Visual Perception Activity for Kids
There were fingers everywhere, adding patchwork squares! Little Guy and I quizzed Baby Girl on her colors as we worked. It was a fun puzzle to get the squares fitting into the outline. What a great way to work on visual perceptual skills, fine motor precision, dexterity, and line awareness!
Visual perceptual skills in kids are necessary for so many things…from self-care to fine motor skills, to gross motor skills…all parts of a child’s development require visual perception. There are many pieces to the giant term of “visual perception”. This Elmer building activity works on quite a few of these areas:
Visual Discrimination is determining differences in color, form, size, shape…Finding different sized squares to fit into the outline of our Elmer, discriminating the different colors, and shapes are a great way to work on this area.
Visual Closure is the ability to fill in parts of a form in the mind’s eye to determine shape or a whole object. Filling in the missing parts of our Elmer works on this area.
Visual Spatial Relations is organizing the body in relation to objects or spatial awareness. This is an important part of handwriting. Spacing those pieces amongst the others and in relation to the lines is one way to work on this skill.
Visual Figure Ground is the ability to locate objects within a cluttered area (think “I Spy”). Finding a red square among the pile of foam pieces is one fun way to work on this area of visual perception.
Little Guy was really into this activity. He loved lining up the squares to make our Elmer.
We loved how our Elmer turned out! We’ll be using our frame again, soon. I can think of so many fun ways to learn and play with this dollar store frame and a marker!
More Elmer the Elephant Activities
Check out some of these Elmer the Elephant activities for kids. They are powerful ways to build awareness, acceptance, and friendship through the book and activity.
Use face paint to celebrate friendship with a face painting party based on the Elmer the Elephant book.
Make an Elmer craft using puppets to celebrate differences, diversity, and uniqueness in a great lesson for kids, while building fine motor skills.
Create an Elmer the patchwork elephant craft using paint to make a paint stamped elephant craft. What a great way to build fine motor skills!
Kids can trace their bodies with large pieces of paper and then fill the space with colorful paper squares to celebrate uniqueness in this Elmer the Elephant preschool activity.
Teach Acceptance, Differences, and Diversity
Want to take complex and abstract concepts like empathy, acceptance, uniqueness, and diversity to the next level with kids? This digital, E-BOOK, Exploring Books Through Play: 50 Activities Based on Books About Friendship, Acceptance and Empathyis filled with hands-on activities rooted in interactive, hands-on, sensory play that focus on creating a well-rounded early childhood education supporting growth in literacy, mathematics, science, emotional and social development, artistic expression, sensory exploration, gross motor development and fine motor skills.
Kids can explore books while building specific skills in therapy sessions, as part of home programs, or in the home. is an amazing resource for anyone helping kids learn about acceptance, empathy, compassion, and friendship.
In this book, you’ll find therapist-approved resources, activities, crafts, projects, and play ideas based on 10 popular children’s books. Each book covered contains activities designed to develop fine motor skills, gross motor skills, sensory exploration, handwriting, and more. Help kids understand complex topics of social/emotional skills, empathy, compassion, and friendship through books and hands-on play.
Click here to get the book and add children’s books based on social emotional learning to your therapy practice, home activities, or classroom.
More books to teach social emotional skills
Check out our other posts in the Preschool Book Club Series for activities based on favorite books:
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
This Easter scissor skills activity for kids is a creative way to work on scissor skills with kids this time of year. Coming up with Easter ideas for kids doesn’t need to be difficult. Use a few items found at your dollar store to help kids address skills like bilateral coordination, graded precision with scissor control, and eye-hand coordination and other fine motor skills. In fact, adding this fine motor activity to an Easter or Spring craft session can be a fun way to build specific skills in a fun way.
This is a quick and easy scissor activity to add to your occupational therapy toolkit. We used a plastic Easter egg and Easter grass (the kind that is used to fill Easter baskets) to work on basic scissor skills like opening and shutting the scissors and using the non-dominant helper hand in a fun cutting activity.
Easter Activity for Kids
This post contains affiliate links.
You’ll need just a few materials for this scissor activity:
Scissors (These are my favorite brand for helping kids learn to cut.)
A scissor activity that is easy to create is a great activity for the Occupational Therapist’s therapy toolkit. We used plastic Easter eggs from our Easter supply bin to hold a long strand of Easter grass. Both of these items can be found at your dollar store, making this a frugal way to address scissor skills.
To create this Easter themed scissor activity, open up the plastic egg. Then, place a long strand of Easter grass in the egg and thread one end of the grass through the hole in the egg. Most plastic Easter eggs have a small hole in one end. If yours doesn’t, then this activity won’t work. Simply look for an egg with the hole in one end of the plastic egg. And that’s it!
You now have an Easter-themed scissor activity ready for practicing basic scissor skills.
Occupational therapy Tools and SKills
There are a myriad number of skills that an occupational therapist can address in kids. Occupational therapists address the underlying skills that interfere with function and occupation. Those OT skills include of fine motor strength, dexterity, stability, coordination, visual perception, sensory processing…the list goes on and on when it comes to meaningful occupations and the occupational therapy tools that address these areas..
One such occupational therapy area that this OT tool addresses are independence with using scissor as well as precision with scissors in their dominant hand. Kids can hold the egg in one hand while managing bilateral coordination, precision, laterality and more. They can pull out the Easter grass through the egg and work on cutting bits of the grass. With a small piece of Easter grass sticking out of the egg, kids can address precision grasp and release when using scissors during cutting tasks. The egg makes a great grasping tool for younger kids. While use of scissors requires children to hold onto and manipulate paper with their non-dominant hand, holding the egg promotes a power grasp with arch development during this cutting with scissors.
Pulling the strand of grass out of the egg is a nice way to work on neat pincer grasp and threading more into the plastic egg’s hole is an excellent way to encourage fine motor development. Here are more Spring fine motor activities to keep your little ones busy and working on hand strength and dexterity this time of year.
Score Fine Motor Tools and resources and help kids build the skills they need to thrive!
Developing hand strength, dexterity, dexterity, precision skills, and eye-hand coordination skills that kids need for holding and writing with a pencil, coloring, and manipulating small objects in every day task doesn’t need to be difficult. The Spring Fine Motor Kit includes 100 pages of fine motor activities, worksheets, crafts, and more:
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
Cut rose petals for a scented activity that develops scissor skills! All you need are real rose petals that fall from a rose bush (or onto your counter top from a vase of roses!) Kids can cut the rose petals with scissors to work on many aspects of scissor skills.
This scented scissor skills activity is one that the kids will love! Picking rose petals and then using them to cut is a creative way to address skills like graded scissor use, line awareness, and precision in grasp and scissor accuracy. Kids will love using rose petals to work on scissor accuracy and the visual motor skills needed for scissor use and the scent of rose petals will make it a memorable activity they will want to do again and again!
Scented Scissor Skills Activity
Cutting rose petals is something we’ve done for years and years around here. It’s a creative way to use scissors to address skills needed for cutting shapes and lines with graded precision. You can read about more creative ideas to address scissor skills and accuracy here on The OT Toolbox.
When there is a vase of flowers in the house, there will be petals to cut!
If you’ve had flowers in the house, then you know that the beautiful scent and colors only last so long. Before the flowers go into the trash or compost, use them to help kids work on fine motor skills and scissor work.
You’ll need just a couple of flowers to get a lot of scissor practice!
Affiliate links are used in this post.
Cut Rose petal Activity
First, ask the child to help you peel and pick off the layers of the rose petals. Add them to a tray or a large bowl. Using such a delicate grasp to pick and peel off flower petals helps with graded precision and bilateral coordination, both which are needed for scissor use and accuracy.
Then, you are ready to start snipping!
There are many types of scissors out there. When I am teaching kids to use scissors, I always recommend these scissors. They are perfect for the child who is learning how to hold scissors and how to cut with accuracy.
The blades of these scissors are nice for children who have trouble with positioning and are just learning to hold the scissors with a neutral wrist positioning.
To work on line awareness and precision with this scissor skill activity, use a pencil to lightly draw a line on the flower petals. Children can cut along the lines to snip the petals. Or, skip the lines and just invite the child to snip the petals into small pieces.
This scissor skills activity provides a beautiful scent when cutting the petals. It’s sure to be a memorable one, triggering the child’s memory of cutting along lines when they smell and recognize the scent of roses at another time in the future!
Preschool Scissor Activity
Cutting rose petals is a great preschool activity to support the development of scissor skills. Simply fill a sensory bin with rose petals and add a pair of scissors. It’s an inviting activity young children will love.
Looking for more ways to work on scissor skills? Try these:
If you are looking for strategies, tips, and ideas to help kids with scissor skills, you will love The Scissor Skills Book.
As an Occupational Therapist, function is the number one goal for working with clients. Whether in the school, clinic, acute setting, or home, all goals of an Occupational Therapist revolve and are based on functional skills.
One thing about occupational therapy professionals is that we love to be creative. I love to use my experience and knowledge to come up with creative ways to meet common goal areas. Take a look around this site and you will find everything from DIY pencil grips to a “egg-cellent” way to work on shoe tying.
Be sure to check out this massive shoe tying resource, too.
Whether there is a diagnosis or not, a developmental delay or not, or just an area of weakness or strength…Kids can build on their strengths to modify, adapt, and address goal areas with one thing in mind: Functional Independence.
This is a place to guide you to areas of functional skill with hopes to bring kids closer to confidence and independence.
This is the place where you will find all of activities designed to promote functional skills of kids. From handwriting to scissor skills, to dressing, and self-care: click around to find a lot of ideas to build independence, adapt, accommodate, and modify functional skills.
This post contains affiliate links.
Functional Skills for Kids and Childhood Independence
If you’ve ever tried to teach kids how to cut with scissors, you may have ended up with a snipped finger or two. Teaching kids how to cut on lines can be a tricky thing. When children with attention or behavior difficulties are learning to cut with scissors, it can be quite difficult to hand over a pair of scissors when there may be a safety concern.
Cutting with scissors can induce anxiety in the most calm of teachers, parents, and therapists when they turn over a pair of sharp scissors to a child with attention or behavioral concerns.
Below, you’ll find tricks and tools to teach kids with attention or behavioral concerns how to slow down to cut on lines with scissors. The tips in this post will enable children of all ages how to slow down and cut on the lines with scissors in order to complete classroom, art, and craft projects.
Attention, Behavior, and Cutting with Scissors
Scissor use and accuracy has a lot to do with visual perceptual skills. You’ll find easy and fun ways to work on visual perceptual skills through play here.
The attentive process helps us determine which sensations (cutting through a piece of paper) are relevant to an individual. Attention allows us to process information in order to complete functional tasks. When we attend to a task such as cutting on a line through the whole shape, we make a decision to pay attention and this effort and concentration allows us to process the task and make adjustments to the task at hand and to future processing of information.
By deciding what to pay attention to, a person decides what information is transferred from sensory input and sensory memories into meaningful information that is stored for future use.
Likewise, children who are not able to make decisions about behavior or attention levels due to sensory or physical difficulties will have trouble attending to the line, paper, scissor position, or seating position.
Attention requires an ability to respond to priority information while disregarding and inhibiting simultaneous sensory input. This concept of attentional ability coincides with an individual’s cognitive, sensory, and physical abilities.
How to Teach Kids to Cut on the Lines With Scissors
This post contains affiliate links.
Children are able to learn to hold and snip with scissors at an early age. Around two years old is a great time to hand over a pair of safety scissors. However, children with decreased attention or behavioral difficulties can affect that optimal age of introducing scissor activities.
Attention needs for using scissors
When kids use scissors, they need many skills in order to hold and use scissors appropriately. There is a safety concern as well, and attention has a lot to do with accuracy and ability to adequately use a pair of scissors to cut lines or shapes:
Visual Attention needed for cutting with scissors– The ability to attend to a line while focusing on cutting along the line with the hands moving in the appropriate way to open and close the scissors and manipulate the paper requires visual attention and visual motor integration skills. To hold the paper, and remember to open and close the scissor blades allow a child to cut a line that makes up a shape.
Bilateral hand use needed for cutting with scissors– A child who can not adequately use both hands together in a coordinated manner while each hand performs a different task will have trouble holding paper with their non-dominant hand as they manipulate a pair of scissors.
Visual Motor Integration needed for cutting with scissors– Visual Motor Integration allows the hands and eyes to work together in an effective way. Efficient coordination of the vision system and the motor system requires both of these parts to work well and to work well together. The visual system requires all aspects of visual perception to work well and the motor system requires positioning, strength, dexterity, and manipulation to work in coordination. If one of these parts is not functioning effectively, a child might exhibit difficulty managing paper, scissors, or body/scissor positioning in coordination with the visual stimuli of lines, shapes, and cutting tasks.
Oculomotor Control needed for cutting with scissors– When we move our eyes to look at items in our field of vision, we use the muscles surrounding the eyes in order to rotate, look up, down, left, and right. If there is a problem with development or use of these muscles, a person will exhibit poor control of eye movements. This problem will result in poor visual tracking skills. This leads to trouble with following scissors as they cut through paper, difficulty maintaining contact with a line, and difficulty with moving the eyes over the mid-line of the paper. An individual with poor oculomotor control may also show difficulty with convergence as they attempt to focus on scissors and paper close together in the mid-line area at a near distance.
Cutting with scissors requires an individual to look down and toward the middle as their eyes rotate inward. A child with oculomotor control will exhibit attention difficulties, poor visual attention, inaccurate eye-hand coordination, poor visual tracking, and loss of place while cutting with scissors.
Auditory Processing needed for cutting with scissors– A child with auditory processing disorder might shoe difficulty when cutting with scissors when given verbal prompts or directions. They might mishear information due to an inability to disregard background noise. This might lead to inattention during scissor tasks.
Visual Attention needed for cutting with scissors– Paying attention to the task at hand in front of a child can be difficult if that individual has difficulty focusing on the paper, scissors, and the lines while discerning important visual sensory input and disregarding background or peripheral information.
Intact kinesthetic, tactile, visual, proprioceptive sensory systems needed for cutting with scissors– Integration of these sensory systems and the ability to process sensory input appropriately enable a person to use scissors while attending to input. Kids who are seeking proprioceptive sensory input may exhibit
When attention or behavior difficulties occur, a child may present in many ways while cutting with scissors:
These problem areas will interfere with cutting on lines.
Impulsive, cutting very quickly
Cutting with disregard for the lines
Cutting and omitting the corners and curves of shapes
Cutting with choppy cuts
Tearing the paper
Cutting and tearing the paper as a result of frustration
When snipping paper, using scissors to cut a helping parent, teacher, or therapist
Demonstrating visual distraction (paying attention to visual distractions in the classroom or home environment)
Demonstrating auditory distraction (paying attention to auditory sensory input from the classroom or home environment)
Cutting alongside the line or crossing over the line as a result of difficulty focusing on the scissors position or cutting lines due to difficulty with oculomotor control
Difficulty maintaining scissor position
Difficulty holding and manipulating the paper with the assisting hand
Inappropriate seating position as a result of sensory needs
Difficulty stopping when cutting into a piece of paper to cut a fringe
Difficulty grading the opening and shutting of the scissor blades
How can a child with attentional or behavioral difficulties overcome deficits to complete a scissor activity given modifications or adjustments? There are many accommodations that can be made to meet the needs of these individuals to prevent impulsivity, choppy snips, and torn paper.
Accommodations and Modifications to Help Kids Cut on the Lines
Try these tips to teach kids to cut on lines. These strategies will help children with attention or behavior problems, or other underlying difficulties. These are also great tips and tools to help typically developing children learn to cut on lines when cutting shapes.
Use bright paper with dark lines for a high contrast cutting line to help with poor oculomotor control and visual distractions.
Explore different types of scissors based on the need of the individual. Spring action scissors to help children with difficulty attending to graded scissor motions or attention to opening and closing the scissor blades. This pair is great for kids.
Verbal cues to slow cutting speed
Provide concise and concrete directions.
Visual cues: Darkened lines, thick and bold cutting lines, stickers to show where to stop and turn the paper, stickers to follow when cutting and turning the paper. Read more about this trick here.
Provide a small movement break between tasks.
Hand over hand physical cues. These training scissors are a great way to practice with hand-over-hand assistance.
Reduce visual distractions: Provide a quiet space for scissor work, use desk dividers, reduce classroom decorations or distracting stimuli, and clear desk or table surface from all items. Find more information on attention in the classroom and home environments here.
place desk away from windows, doors, and the pencil sharpener.
Reduce auditory stimulation. Provide headphones or position desk away from noisy centers of the room.
Develop active listening skills and direction following through eye contact and and upright body position.
Provide thicker paper for increased resistance an more tactile and proprioceptive feedback while cutting. More resistive materials include oaktag, index cards, construction paper, and paper bags.
Try gluing worksheets and cutting pages to thicker paper like cardstock.
Trial graded and physical, verbal, and auditory prompts.
Ensure the cutting task is purposeful and meaningful in order to maintain motivation.
For the child with oculomotor convergence insufficiency, try holding the paper up higher or using a bold cutting line.
The Scissor Skills Book
Affiliate links are included in this post.
Ten Occupational Therapists and Physical Therapists have gotten together to write The Scissor Skills Book. It’s a book with resources for every underlying area needed for scissor use. It’s got tons of motor activities to address the areas needed for scissor skills. There are pages and pages of accommodations and creative ways to work on scissor use. This e-book is a giant resource for anyone who works with kids on cutting with scissors!
The therapists behind the Functional Skills for Kids series include a team of 10 pediatric physical and occupational therapists with years of experience in the field. Together, we have created the ultimate resource for tips, strategies, suggestions, and information to support scissor skill development in children. Read more about The Scissor Skills Book here.
The Scissor Skills Book is an 81 page PDF document that is delivered electronically. The book includes the following chapters:
Chapter 1: Developmental Progression of Scissor Skills
Chapter 2: Teaching Your Child to Use Scissors
Chapter 3: Gross Motor and Scissor Skills
Chapter 4: Fine Motor and Scissor Skills
Chapter 5: Visual Perceptual and Scissor Skills
Chapter 6: Sensory Processing and Scissor Skills
Chapter 7: Attention Challenges and Scissor Skills
Chapter 8: Helping Kids who Struggle with Scissor Skills
Chapter 9: Creative Ways to Practice Scissor Skills with Kids
Resources for Typical and Adaptive Scissors, Cutting Materials, and Further Information
References
Resources: Zoltan, B. Vision, Perception, and Cognition: A Manual for the Evaluation and Treatment of the Neurologically Impaired Adult. Thorofare, New Jersey, Slack Inc.;1996.
