Introduction: What is Cutting Practice and Why is it Important?
Cutting practice is an important skill that preschoolers need to learn in order to be prepared for elementary school.
The best way to teach your child how to cut is by assigning them a task. For example, cutting out shapes from paper or cutting vegetables for a salad.
During cutting you should first of all pay attention to your child and others safety. It is very important to teach your child how they should carefully use the scissors. Be careful to use not very sharp scissors.
More about safety you can find in one of our article.
Activity 1 - Cutting Shapes
Cutting shapes is a fun and easy way to make your own decorations for any occasion.
To cut shapes, you will need:
- A straight edge ruler
- Scissors
- Paper
- A pencil or pen
You can create various shapes for your child yourself, or easily find them on the internet and print them.
It is good to start from easy shapes, like lines, rectangles, squares and continue to the shapes like stars, waves, clouds, flowers, christmas tree and go further and further to the hardest ones like octopus, plane, dinosaurus …
Activity 2 - Paper Chains
A paper chain is a long strand of paper that is folded into individual sections.
A paper chain is made by folding a piece of paper in half, then folding it again, and so on. Paper chains can be used as decorations for a party or holiday event, or they can be given to children as playthings.
The shape of the chain will depend on the size and shape of the cutouts you use. For example, if you use round shapes, your chain will have circles at each fold. If you use square shapes, your chain will have squares at each fold.
Some shapes can be decorated by other shapes like stars, clouds, christmas trees …
Activity 3 - Paper Plate Flowers
Paper plates are a cheap and easy material to make flowers with. You can use them to make different shapes of flowers and then let the kids decorate them with paint, glitter, and other materials.
You can also purchase paper plate flowers in various shapes from craft stores like Walmart or Michaels.
Activity 4 - Cut and Paste Activities
Cut and paste activity lets your child not only develop fine motor skills and improve hand-eye coordination, but also goes further and helps use their imagination and logic to glue them together into something bigger.
Your kid will learn that all big things have separate small parts.
Activity 5 - Cutting the Same Shape
With cutting the same shape your kid will not only learn how to carefully cut the shapes correctly, but also will learn to fix two pieces together, rotate two figures together.
Before starting this activity, prepare shapes with harder material, for example with thicker papers, give that shape to your kid and ask to create the same one.
