The Easiest Way to Teach Kids to Hold Scissors
There are many basic tasks that children usually cannot solve by honing their fine motor skills. For example, holding a pencil , tying shoes and putting on their own jacket are all skills we help them learn with practice and patience. However, when it comes to owning scissors, we may prefer to get them as good as possible and as quickly as possible.
Small children do not know how to hold scissors correctly. They twist their arms and wrists at an uncomfortable angle, attacking this cardboard in such a way that they crack it, not cut it. But Busy Toddler’s Susie Ellison has a simple trick for this , and all you need is a marker or a little sticker:
Use a marker or sticker to mark the thumbnail of their dominant hand. As Allison writes :
Draw a smiley face with a marker (permanent rinsing is excellent) and tell your child to “hold the smiley face up.” This helps to make the REALLY abstract idea super-concrete: children immediately “see” what they need to do to learn how to cut more successfully.
If they do not practice with scissors at home, children will eventually learn the correct scissor techniques in preschool or kindergarten. But by using this trick with them in preschool, you can give them a head start so they are better prepared for all of their high school art projects.