Life Skills: Apple Tree Scissor Practice

Along with regular educational preschool/K basics, I've also made a list of things that I call "Life Skills".  Anything that falls under the category of "things a person should know in order to function in life" is listed here.  Obviously at the moment the list is comprised of things that are within the learning and physical capacity of a four and three year old.  For instance, every time we are at a playground now, we practice swinging on the big kid swing instead of putting them in the baby swings (my kids are very small for their age, so we have had to wait on a lot of gross motor skills over the years).

Right now we are also focusing on learning to use scissors.  We introduced scissors with a discussion of how to carry and hold them and how to definitely not and why.  Then we practiced the right finger placement for scissors (the best way to accomplish this was to lay the scissors on the table with the thumb part facing down, so the kids could just put their finger and thumb in the right place by themselves). We spent a couple of days last week just having them snip and shape PlayDoh with no confines or real guidelines just to get them used to the skill.

This week, we graduated to paper cutting with a fun Apple Tree craft that not only practices scissor skills but a few more fine motor skills such as gluing and pasting.  I printed off a free tree template ahead of time from Best Coloring Pages for Kids, then cut green and red paper into easy to cut strips. The kids then snipped and pasted their "leaves" and "apples" to their trees. Simple and fun  practice of an important skill..

Materials:

Tree Printable
Green and Red Strips of Paper (more green than red)
Children's Scissors
Glue Sticks

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