Scissor Practice for 2-year-olds

Do all 2-year-olds have an obsession with scissors? Allie sure does, and I remember Grace having one at 2, too.

Every time Allie walks through the dining room (where her special yellow scissors are), she says, I cut paper? I want to cut with scissors.

She once cut some contracts in half, but fortunately, keeping the scissors out of her reach has prevented much collateral damage.

She has been erratically cutting paper for a few weeks, so I wanted to see how well she could use the scissors.

Materials

I forgot half of the materials in my photo. Sorry.

• Kid scissors (obviously)
• Cardstock or craft foam in two colors (because it's stiffer and has less tendency to flop around than regular paper)
• Marker
• Glue

This was so easy; I almost didn't write this blog post. But, I thought it might be helpful to someone, so I went ahead and did it.

1. Draw a line dividing the paper in half. It doesn't matter whether you make hot dog sections (long and skinny) or hamburger (short and fat) halves.

2. Help your kiddo to cut along the straight line. See those fingernails? Grace painted them for her before I woke up one morning. (!!!)

3. Draw more straight lines, to make squares, rectangles, and triangles. Be sure to narrate the shapes as you help your little one to cut them. Also talk about bigger and smaller shapes.

4. Arrange the shapes (as she one cut them - don't even them up or trim the edges!) into something on a piece of paper. I talked Allie into making a fish. I laid out a square and a couple of triangles, and I helped her to glue them down. She had a hard time getting any glue to come out of the bottle.

5. Press, press the shapes down.

6. Even though my fish was finished, Allie was not finished. She wanted to keep gluing shapes onto the paper. I really wanted to be done and photograph my fish made of shapes, but I {reluctantly} went along with her vision.

7. When she said we were finished, I asked her where the fish's face should go. She pointed and said eyes and mouf and teef, so I put them where she wanted. She was happy.

Here's the simple little fish I was imagining when we started. Maybe next time.