Jack and I have been working on his hand/scissor skills for a while now. As a crafter, you can be sure I was pretty eager to have him start working with them but I tried to hold off until he had the right skills, patience and maturity to use them in the correct manner. I really think it’s help cut down on frustration as well.
To start,we began strengthening muscles and developing coordination when he was tiny by attaching and removing clothespins from cups, cardboard, trays, you name it. After that, we moved onto other simple projects like color sorting poofs with tongs or transferring cotton balls from one jar to another with tweezers. Just recently he graduated to picking up noodles with training chopsticks.
A little bit before he turned three, we introduced training scissors (the ones that bounce back after you squeeze them shut). For some reason, these really annoyed him. Maybe it was that he was still a little too young or that he wanted to have more control or maybe a combination of the two. Either way, once we gave him real scissors (meant for kids, obviously), it didn’t take long for Jack to get the hang of them.
With his new scissors, the first activity we worked on was cutting up thin strips. The strips were long enough so that he could hold it in his left hand and cut with his right, but not so wide that he couldn’t cut through them in one slice.
Now, we’ve moved on to cutting through paint swatch strips by following the white lines (thanks for the wonderful idea, Happy Hooligans!). He loved doing it and I loved watching how wonderfully he controlled the scissors. You can give a kid some scissors and watch them hack through a piece of paper at almost any age but to watch Jackson actually decide on how he wants to make a tool work and have the physical skill set to enact it…amazing.
Don’t forget to enter the I Love You Giveaway on Facebook! Four lucky readers will win unique, hand painted prints of the “I Love Everything About You” print I posted last week. Giveaway ends January 20th.
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