Basic Cutting Activities
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These easy cutting activities are designed to give your child lots of practice in mastering scissor cutting.
They are designed for children who have already learned to use scissors but need lots of practice to cut on lines and to cut out shapes.
Make sure your child is cutting with an appropriate scissor grasp, and preferably on paper that is about double regular thickness.
Use my free cutting template at the end of this page to print out the lines and shapes you need!
- Straight Line Cutting Activities
- Cutting Circles and Spirals
- Cutting Simple Shapes
- More Advanced Cutting
- Free Cutting Template Download
- Help! My child can't cut with scissors yet
- Related Pages
Straight Line Cutting Activities
Be creative and give your child lots and lots of practice cutting on thick straight lines.
Use the straight lines on the free template to carry out these activities.
Staple or tape the lines together to make a good old-fashioned paper chain, or a paper flower.
Or try a paper lantern or simple paper decorations.
The templates for these two activities can be find in my Christmas Scissor Cutting E-Book.
Cutting Circles And Spirals
Use the circles and lines in your free template to make the spider and the caterpillar.
Spider Cutting Activity
Add a circle to 8 lines.
Stick or staple them together to make a spider.
Add some string to the middle to make a dangly spider.
Caterpillar Cutting Activity
Cut 5 or 6 circles and stick them together to make a caterpillar.
Stick the "head" circle a little higher than the rest and give it a smiley face. Add pipe cleaner feelers.
Add little pipe cleaner legs to the first segment ( I folded 3 short
sections in half and pushed them through three little holes).
Spiral Snakes
Spiral snakes are so much fun!
You can draw a spiral on a paper plate, or use a free download from here (opens in new window).
Please note: for a left handed child, the spiral needs to go the other way!
How to make a "leftie" snake: Stick the "right hand" snake to a window (so you can see the outline through the paper) and trace the outline on the back of the paper to get a snake with the spiral going the other way.
When you give it to your left handed child, make sure he/she cuts out the spiral on the BACK of the paper.
Cutting Simple Shapes
Use the free cutting template to cut out triangles and squares.
Then try these creations!
Build a house!
Create a Rocket!
Make a Fir Tree!For more ideas and templates that use simple shapes, check out the Fun Cutting Templates that you can buy alone or as a freebie with my Scissor Skills E-Book.
More Advanced Cutting
Once your child has mastered going around the external corners of squares and triangles, then he/she will need to practice manipulating the scissors around internal
corners (such as hearts and stars).
Cutting out smaller pieces and/or on a thinner line is also challenging, as it requires more careful control of the scissors.
Ask your child to cut out groceries from a supermarket flyer to make a shopping list!
Look for activities with thinner lines, on
normal-thickness paper, and with "interesting" angles and corners. I link to some in my "related pages" section below.
You can also try these simple kirigami ideas with older kids! (opens to a different site in a new window)
Free Cutting Template
My free PDF download contains printable cutting templates for thick straight lines, circles, squares, triangles and a house cutting activity.
This basic cutting template will enable your child to create the activities suggested on this page!
Check the boxes below to unlock access to your freebie - no need to give away your email address or sign up for anything!
For more scissor cutting practice, check out these additional cutting templates on my site.
These activities are more advanced and contain a greater range of cutting activities than the download above.
These printable e-book downloads will make it easy for you to access cutting activities whenever you need them!
My Child Can't Cut With Scissors Yet
If your child hasn't developed a good grasp-release motion on the scissors yet, or if you have no idea where to start teaching your child to cut with scissors, then these pages on my site should help...
You can also buy my Scissor Skills E-Book for just $5 to get lots of helpful tips and guidelines from my site, plus additional fun cutting templates to help you get started!
Thank you for visiting my site! I hope you found these cutting activities useful for your child!
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