Why Your Child Needs to Practice Their Preschool Scissor Skills

If you aren’t working with your child on their preschool scissor skills, start today!

Sure children get some practice if they go to a preschool, but additional scissor skills will serve them well as they get older. This post contains affiliate links.

Why Your Child Needs to Practice Their Preschool Scissor Skills

Scissor skills are super important for kids of all ages to master for a number of reasons:

1. Scissor skills help child strengthen their grip with the opening and closing of the scissors. This skill is important for when they start to write, paint and even brush their own teeth.
2. Practicing cutting helps kids work on their hand-eye coordination. Even though we don’t think about it, a child has to process what they see and move their hand to match the cutting lines.
3. Cutting makes a child practice their bilateral coordination. Bilateral what, you ask! Basically, it’s using both sides of your body. When your child cuts, they also have to use their other hand to hold the paper, which takes serious skill!

“Many times when I was working in the school system, a lot of the kids had very poor scissor skills. Often times they could not cut on the line, had many jagged edges, or would cut too fast. Also being able to hold the paper at the same time as the scissors was a hard skill.” – Creator Heather, Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant and Blogger at Growing Hands-On Kids

Practice Scissor Skills

One of the main reasons kids have difficulty with cutting is of lack of exposure. I know when my sons were young, I was afraid to give them kid scissors. I mean, boys combined with scissors? What kind of trouble would they get into?

But once my kids entered preschool, I found some great kids scissors they could use during cutting activities without me worrying. Of course, always keep the scissor in a safe place and out of reach when they aren’t in  use. We’ve all heard the stories of kids giving themselves hair cuts because they love using their new skill!

Heather has created a terrific scissor practice pages for preschool through 1st grade (ages 3-7). All of the pages are set up in an age appropriate sequence, starting with straight lines, so there’s no guess work to where to begin with your own kiddo.

To use the pages, have your child start at the beginning of the packet and work on each line and shape as they master the previous one.

In addition, the back of the packet includes fun animals and pictures that can be colored, cut out and glued onto construction paper to make a picture.

To purchase now, just click on the following graphic:

For more fine motor practice, consider the following: