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Play Dough And Scissors

by 5 Comments

strengthening-scissor-skills-with-play-dough-mama-papa_-bubba_

Recently I spent sometime with 4-6 year old’s and I was very surprised to see that they could not use scissors correctly. I am assuming that because my children have grown up with scissors on the table most of the time (due to craft) they picked it up quickly.  One little boy struggled not only to hold the scissors but to hold the thin paper. This idea from mamapapabubba.com is a great idea. It utilizes a material  (play dough) that the kids are familiar in handling.

So this starts a question :

When did you introduce Scissors to you child? Have the actually ever cut themselves?

 

 

 

Comments

  1. My kids are grown but they started using real scissors at 4-5. A girl & a boy and they never cut themselves. Started with big shapes.

  3. My daughter seemed to be proficent before i officially gave them to her. I just “loved” that first haircut. I then officially gave her access to scissors and paper its been a few years but she had to be 2 or a little younger. She never injured herself and hair regrows.

  4. From my teaching experience, I have seen many 5-6 year olds who have no idea how to hold scissors, or the paper. I just wonder if some parents don’t provide “craft time” as much as “video game time”. My son was using scissors at daycare (with supervision)from 3 yrs on.

  5. My daughter was desperate to get ahold of my scissors from a very early age, but I made her wait until she was about two, I think… I found some safety scissors that were supposedly for very small children- completely made of plastic with no sharp points or edges anywhere. She loved them and used them constantly, but she got frustrated easily because they didn’t work very well. But, at least she never cut anything that wasn’t meant to be cut! Which was my goal. For Easter this year, I got her a new pair of “safety” scissors. They’re labeled as 4+. As far as I can tell, she has never touched them. But she has been (supervised only!) using my extremely sharp and pointy embroidery scissors. She does okay, and knows to be super careful of where her fingers are.

Have you read?

Fun Halloween Worksheets for Kids

After sharing some witch themed math activities, I found a bunch more fun printable worksheets with a Halloween theme for kids to try, so let’s take a look at some more low-prep Halloween learning fun. 

Give kids practice measuring bats, spiders, ghosts and more with these printables from What I Have Learned Teaching. Kids can use a ruler, unit cubes or even little Halloween themed erasers to measure and track the size of the images. 

Practice symmetry by drawing half a haunted house, ghost, skull or other simple images with this activity from Printables Hub. 

I always love a good roll and draw activity, too, so check out this roll and draw a ghost activity (which has printable instructions) from Finding Myself Young.

Missy Printable Design has a cute set of Halloween worksheets for preschool, including tracing the letter H and a haunted house, spider counting, number tracing, sequencing, coloring pages and more. 

The Halloween themed printables from The Artisan Life are meant to be playdough mats, and you can definitely use them for that to make the shape and trace the letters. But you could also use pipe cleaners or Wikki Stix, or line up buttons or anything else on them. 

Older kids will enjoy this witch’s brew logic puzzle from Education.com. The witch has made different potions with different colors that do different things, and using the clues you can figure out which one is which. (Don’t worry; there’s an answer key included if you can’t figure it out on your own!)

Another fun puzzle is this decoder activity from Crafting Cheerfully. The holiday icons each represent a letter, and kids can use the decoder to answer the riddle. This isn’t a free resource (and the link in the post is broken but you can find it here) but it includes 20 riddles and an editable file so you can make up your own codes to decipher. 

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