Kindergarten Prep: Teach Your Kids to Use Scissors

This is a simple skill that is used a lot in kindergarten, but stay at home moms may not think about it as an activity to do with their own kids. Your child will be using scissors quite often when they get to school, and cutting is usually not the ultimate objective in the activity.  Students will cut out objects and then do something with them, like ordering smallest to largest.  If your child is already proficient with scissors, it will clear the way for other academic objectives.  Plus, kids love to cut.  Preschoolers could spend hours just cutting paper.

Get a pair of kid's safety scissors at your local grocery store ($1.88 last time I checked at Walmart).

Teach them safety rules about the scissors:

1. Stay seated while cutting

2. No running with scissors (ha ha)

3. When passing scissors to other people, hold the blades, not the handle.

About 2 1/2 to 3 is a good time to introduce scissors, depending on your child's development and trustworthiness with potentially sharp objects.

Harder paper is easier to cut, so pick up some construction or scrapbooking paper while you're at Walmart.  

When cutting shapes, kids will try to move their hand around the paper, instead of turning the paper in relation to their hand.  Help them to use one hand to hold the paper and move it as they cut.  

Draw straight, wavy and jagged lines on a paper for them to cut along.  

Let them dig through old magazines and cut out pictures of things they like.  Let them glue the pictures onto paper to make a collage.  You can make color collages, nature collages, animal collages, use your imagination!