Cutting Practice

A few years ago, I read a blog post from Shuna over at Pocket Full of Kinders about teaching your students to cut.  I never "taught" my students to cut, we just dove right into it.  Her post made a lot of sense because some of the students honestly had never seen a pair of scissors in their lives and definitely needed some practice.

We try to make everything relevant, so I told them we were making salad.  I made all our parts out of bulletin board paper.  We started by TEARING paper.  I forgot to take a picture of this somehow.  The point of tearing the paper is to teach them that their hands have to WORK TOGETHER.  This was very frustrating for some students, but that's ok! Encourage, encourage, encourage! Have them tear their paper into a plate to save the scraps and a mess!   Next I gave them a yellow strip of paper to practice SNIPPING.  We called this the cheese for our salad.  I told them it was like a chef that cut up veggies super fast but we were gonna "snip snip snip" instead of "cut cut cut" and they loved that.  This teaches them to make small quick cuts while letting their hands work together.

The last thing we did that day was FRINGE cut.  This helps teach them control with the scissors! (We called this our hula napkin.)  When we practiced we would say "cut, cut, cut and STOP" so that they didn't cut all the way through.  I reminded them again that their hands had to work together.

The next day, we practiced cutting long strips.  This is important to us because when we do a cut and paste worksheet they have to do this and we want to minimize trash and do it efficiently.

We also practiced cutting curved lines, zig zag lines and wavy lines.  This was somewhat difficult, but they did quite well with the task!

Finally we cut out shapes, a circle, triangle and square, which didn't seem to be a problem for anyone after all of that cutting and somehow I missed pictures of that! 

The prep work for the first part is a little time consuming but so worth it! If you'd like some extra practice with the second part, grab it here for free! 

How do you help your students learn to cut?