Kindergarten Readiness Skills: Safe Scissors Activities for Kids

Written by Lori Toney, English teacher, educational writer and mother of three school children

When my kids were about to start Kindergarten, I worried whether they could count high enough, or how many sight words they could read. But I didn’t always think about the other, less obvious readiness skills that are nevertheless critical to their development.

One of them is the ability to cut safely with scissors. 

While they might seem to be less important than foundational academic skills like math and reading, scissor skills are much more than just cutting! 

Mastering scissors develops fine motor skills and improves pencil grip while fostering bilateral coordination and engaging both sides of their brain simultaneously. This necessary ingredient will help your child tremendously in completing the academic tasks in class. And it’s good to remember that school isn’t just about internalizing knowledge—it’s also about learning to manipulate and produce things! 

With that in mind, I’ve collected some exciting and safe scissor activities to help preschoolers develop and reinforce this critical ability.

Pre-cutting Activities for Struggling Scissor Wielders 

Does your preschooler still have butterfingers? No worries, as some children just need some extra focus and practice! For those prone to fidgeting and find fine motor skills tough, start out by trying the following: 

• Play games with kitchen tongs and tweezers

The idea is to build strength and coordination by mimicking the same movements used to cut with scissors. Create a fun game by giving your child kitchen tongs and challenging participants to pick up small items and sort them or race to put them all in a container. For example, include a variety of different sizes, shapes, and textures, such as ice cubes, Lego bricks, or pom poms. Make it a scavenger hunt by hunting for only items that can be picked up with tweezers. Take the scavenger hunt outside to make it an interdisciplinary lesson that hunts for nature items! 

• Make sock, mitten or paper bag puppets

Stoke your kid’s creativity by creating DIY puppets. Playing with the puppets to open and close their mouths mimics the action of cutting with scissors, while also encouraging imagination and artistic skills. Make it into an ELA activity by helping kids plan a play performance!

• Use blunt-tip scissors to cut Playdoh snakes or worms

Of course, all kids need practice with scissors directly, even if they are struggling to get the hang of it. While playing with Playdoh, make snakes, worms, or other creepy crawlies by rolling tubes of dough. Using blunt-tip scissors, practice snipping through the dough to make creatures of different sizes. As they get better at it, they can make smaller, more intricate animals, such as butterflies.

For More Capable Cutters

So, your child can use scissors but may need some extra practice to cut more cleanly. Try these activities before moving on to the advanced projects:

• Make a cutting collection book

Challenge learners to cut in different ways, saving each activity as a page in a cutting collection book! To do this, compile different types of lines to cut, such as straight, thick, thin, zig zag, or squiggly lines. Create your own challenges by drawing shapes and lines on construction paper with a Sharpie. When finished, make a book, which could simply be a collection of papers bound together, or a binder. Help label and date each challenge to make it into a writing activity, too! 

• Cut and paste puzzles using coloring pages from Kids Academy

Cut and paste puzzles are so much fun, and you can make your own! Simply select coloring pages from our website to print and allow your child to color them. Then, instruct learners to cut the page into long, horizontal strips. All they need to do is cut all the way cross to make several strips. When finished, rearrange the strips so kids must put them back in order by piecing the picture together strip-by-strip. Use a glue stick to glue each strip onto a sheet of construction paper to make the page whole again.

For Snipping Superstars

Even if your child has already mastered cutting with scissors, it only opens the door for more creative projects that can encourage their creativity. For more advanced practice, see these exciting activities: 

• Create fringe snips to make grass and layered pictures

Cutting with scissors can also be a technique to create texture and multi-layered pictures! For example, kids can build a picture using different colors and sheets of construction paper. Choose a background, such as light blue for the sky. Then select a green shape and cut a strip that will serve as grass. Snip fringes along one side of the strip to make it look like grass before pasting it to the bottom of the blue sheet. Add more layers to the pictures by cutting out more objects, like trees or the sun! 

• Cutting different textures, like fabric, poster board, felt, etc.

Finally, encourage practice with a variety of different textures. This may require different scissors but do only what you think would be safe for your child! When they’re ready, they can even add to their cutting collection book by including different items they have cut. This may include scraps of fabric, felt shapes, poster board, cereal boxes, pipe cleaners, or anything else you have lying around the house.

With the activities above, I am confident that your little learner will be ready to go for kindergarten! For even more resources to improve your child’s readiness skills, head over to www.kidsacademy.mobi to find our entire library of worksheets, videos, and games!