Scissors Practice

 I remember my first day as a preschool teacher. I planned the cooperative crayons activity. We were going to color and cut out the crayons and it was going to be great. The kids colored their crayons so I gave them some scissors and said, "Okay, cut it out" . . . The results weren't very pretty. 

I didn't realize that as a preschool teacher, it was my job to teach them how to use scissors and cut. I guess I thought they would just naturally know how to do it. 

Well, I've come a long way from that naive first day teacher and I know that we need to practice using scissors a lot before we move on to cutting things out. Here's a few ways we practice using scissors

Mosaics

Provide your students with scissors, white paper, glue, and strips of colorful paper of varying widths. (I do 1 inch, 1 1/2 inch and 1/2 inch)

Let them practice holding and using the scissors by cutting up the colored strips and gluing them to the white paper.

Then, the teacher can cut out their papers into a bigger shape to make a mosaic. We did butterflies, but you could do any shape that fits with what you are learning that day. 

Scissors Practice Pages

These pages are designed to help students practice cutting straight, curved and zigzag lines. The - open, move forward, close, open, move forward, close - pattern takes some practice to master. You can find a bunch of good pages at dltk-kids.com. The link is here.